Anthony Scaramucci

0:00It's a podcast. It's on YouTube. It's a way of life. It's called Rosebud. I'm Gyles Brandreth. Cue the music.

0:30Hello again, this is Giles Branworth and this is the Rosebud Podcast. If you're listening to this in real time, it is Friday the 3rd of July, 2026, which means that tomorrow is the 4th of July, 2026, and officially the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, a quarter of a millennium. And we've been celebrating America for the past few weeks here on Rosebud on Fridays, meeting some remarkable and very interesting American guests. Today, I wanted somebody who had a bit of a political take, somebody whose voice I really like, whose ideas I find intriguing, and who I listen to regularly on another podcast, which is The Rest is Politics, the US version.

1:20So you've guessed immediately that I'm going to be talking to either Katty Kay or Anthony Scaramucci. I tossed a coin. It landed on Anthony Scaramucci. So he is our guest today. And if you've heard him or seen him, you'll know he's a most fascinating and rather brilliant character. His claim to fame, he's an American financier. He's an American broadcaster. and he served briefly and really very briefly as the White House communications director in Donald Trump's first term. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about him being an Italian-American, about his childhood, about his links, if there are any, to the mafia, about his first marriage, his second marriage and what happened with that.

2:07We're going to talk about his story, his story as an American. And I think you will enjoy this very special episode of Rosebud with Anthony Scaramucci. The mooch is in the building. Enjoy. Cue the music.

2:39Anthony Scaramucci. Do I call you Anthony? I love the, say the whole name just one more time for all of us because I love the way you. And I love saying it. I've been saying it a lot. Can I say in recent days, knowing you were coming, I've been saying, oh yes, our guest is Anthony Scaramucci. I love it. I love the way you say it. Yeah, you can call me Anthony. I've been called Mooch. I've been called worse than Anthony and Mooch. So I mean, it's all good. Anything you want to call me. A slight TH is hurt, isn't it? Anthony. Yeah. Although Caddy Case is Anthony, I think, or Anthony. like Mark Anthony.

3:08But again, you can say anything you want. I guess the only thing that never happened to me for some reason, no one ever called me Tony for some reason, so I've never been called Tony. And yet, as you can discover, there is an Italian heritage. And I think of Italian Tony as being Tony. Anyway, you are Anthony Scaramucci, born on the 6th of January, 1964? At 11 a.m. At 11 a.m. Nassau Hospital, Mineola, New York. Anthony Scaramucci, what is your very first memory? My very first memory is riding the bus. I was probably about two and a half, three years old, and I was with my grandmother. And of course, she didn't know how to drive, and she put me on the bus with her.

3:52And I can remember it because I was very young, very small, but I could remember the smells on the bus, the metallic smell. And I have this vivid memory of her squeezing my hand in this overprotective position where I remember thinking, well, and I could sense her worry. And even though I was a young, young kid, you know. Where was this bus? And who was this grandmother? Who was she, the mother? So she, her name was Maria Aldorada DeFeo. And she was my mom's mother. Unfortunately, I never met my dad's parents. They died before I was born. but I did get to meet my grandfather and my grandmother or my nono and my nana, as we would have said in our Italian American community.

4:41And she died when I was nine, but I was very close to her. I would say that my first nine years on earth, I was parented by two Catholic and very tough Italian American women. And so, you know, I got hit with the wooden spoon. You know, they would do this with their hand. You know, you had to run. What was that with your hand? What happened? That was a sign of anger in southern Italy. If my grandmother went like this with her hand, you were getting hit with something. We didn't know what it was, but something was coming. She did this before it happened? Yeah, before it happened. And this was trying to control herself?

5:14Yeah. A signal to you? A signal to me. Look out, something's going to happen. And it would be a wooden spoon? Yeah, we got hit with the spoon. On the hand? On the head? Yeah, get hit in the ass, other side of the head. You know, she pulled my hair. They were tough. They were tough. But they were great. I mean, she was a wonderful person, and she had a lot of Catholic faith. And I think I got from her something, the word for it. She didn't know this word, but I got it from her. The word is paranoia. Have you heard of the word paranoia? No. It's the opposite of paranoia. You know, the universe is turning towards you, and the universe, the people around you are there to help you.

5:54And she had this unstinting faith in that, and she had this unconditional love affair with America. and I think she turned me into a pro-Neuac, if you will. Where was the bus? So the bus was actually on Main Street in Port Washington. Where is Port Washington? Where I grew up, Port Washington is a hamlet on the north shore of Long Island. New York? Yep, it used to be called Cow Neck, General Washington, that traitor, known as a traitor to you and an American patriot to me. He quartered troops on the south side, the south eastern side of the bay there. And after the Revolutionary War, they renamed the town Port Washington after him.

6:37And the streets that I grew up on, these were very tiny houses. It was a middle class area. The streets were named after the founding fathers. And so there was a Jefferson Street and an Adams Street. And it was all Italian-Americans, and they were all blue-collar people. And Italian-Americans. Your grandmother, was she first-generation American? Yeah. I think defining first generation, she was born in Italy, and she came over. So your mother, what was her name? Maria, named after her mom. And so her maiden name was DeFeo. And she met my father in 1953. And do you know how they met? Literally how they met, the moment they met your two parents?

7:19They met in a place called Freddy's Restaurant, and it was on Port Washington Boulevard. It's not there anymore, but they met, and it was like an old-school New York-style diner with the coffee stations and the soda fountain and the full circular swivel seats. And how old were each of them? Okay, so she was 16. He was 18. She was dating somebody. He was soliciting her. and then he convinced her and her two of her classmates because he was already graduated from high school and he had a car. He was a hustler. He had a car. He convinced them to go to Jones Beach with him, which would be the south shore of Long Island, big, beautiful ocean there.

8:04And he got a flat tire on the way there and he's out there changing the tire and she's like yelling at him, which my mother is known to have done. and he had grease all over his hands and he took his hands and he put the grease on her white t-shirt. And I don't know why that attracted my mother to him, but for some reason, I guess that sort of push-pull, they got married. How quickly did they get married? So they - Because if she's only - She met him in 53. She got married on January 20th, 1957. They dated on and off for the first two years and it got more serious. She ended up marrying him, married him at the local church, had the wedding reception at a local restaurant.

8:47And both families enthusiastic about it? No, no. Why not? Well, my grandfather thought my dad was too poor to marry. You know, my grandfather had made a little bit of money. He was a car mechanic. He owned a few houses, which my mother actually still owns. And he thought my dad was too poor for my... My mother was dating a son of a judge, and my grandfather approved of him because his father was a judge, and my father was a scrappy poor kid from northeastern Pennsylvania, and my grandfather's mind a nobody, so no, he didn't approve of the marriage. But you say your dad was a bit of a hustler, and so he got usually what he wanted.

9:30He was a hard worker, he was persistent, he was a charming guy, good-looking guy. Was he good-looking, yeah. Cool-looking guy, charming guy. He got what he wanted. But they had a rough marriage. I'm not going to mince words on the Rosebud podcast. Why did they have a rough marriage? Was it rough from the beginning? They were married too young. They were personality mismatched, which happened a lot in these Italian Catholic families. Explain and pick that a bit. What is the mismatch? You know, my father was more of an extrovert. My mother's quite introverted. My mother is, you know, she was smarter than my father.

10:01My mother was a lefty. The Catholic nuns forced her to write with her right hand. It was a superstition. Oh, you don't mean lefty as we mean in England, left-wing politically. No, no. She used a left hand. She wrote with her left hand. And the nuns at our convent school, they forced her to write with her right. Yeah, there was a superstition about that as a left-handed person back in that day. But I say the reason why she's lefty, because left-handed people often, they think on the right side of the brain. Us as right-handers think on the left side. So there's a creativity of my mother. There's a near photographic memory.

10:35My mother's almost 90. She can do the math in her head. She can eyeball a bill very quickly. She can assimilate information. Not an educated woman, but a very sharp, very witty woman. My father was more of a blocking and tackling sort of a person. He was a hard worker. I think I got my work ethic from him, but probably some of my wits from my mother. As a little boy, were you conscious of the tension between them? Oh, my God. They were fighting every day. I mean, my older brother, me and my sister, I think I said at maybe their 50th wedding anniversary, I mean, they've managed to put 600 years into 50 years.

11:14I mean, a 50-year marriage, they put 600 years of fighting into it. I don't know how they managed to do that, but they managed to do it. But they kept going. It was the Catholics. You know, the Catholics don't believe in divorce, nuclear family. Did they stray at all? Did your father, do we know this? I'm sure. You know, listen, you know, I tried to stay out of that part of the fracas, but, you know. It's possible. It was a red-blooded attack. It was definite. It was impossible. You know, I mean, look, it is what it is, but it caused a lot of tumult, and there was a lot of financial anxiety in the house.

11:49It was one thing my grandfather was right about. You know, my dad had a working-class job. You know, he was a hourly worker. He did, you know, when he got older, he did some dispatching and he did some other things for the company because he got to a certain age prior to his retirement where he couldn't really be the operator of the crane. But he, listen, and I would never dishonor my dad's work ethic or anything like that to say I grew up poor. I did not grow up poor. I lived in a nice house. It was a small house. It had one operating bathroom for five of us. We had a little hallway kitchen. We had heat in the winter.

12:26We had air conditioning in the summer, although my dad was very strict about that. The air conditioner went into the window on Memorial Day. It came out of the window on Labor Day. It could be 400 degrees. He didn't care. That was the rules, you know. And so he was very strict. But we were tight. We had money anxiety in the house. If my father's job hours got cut, well, then we felt the anxiety. And I went and got a job. I was 11 years old. I went and got myself a job. I had a paper route. I then got my work papers to work in the local supermarket. My uncle Sal had a motorcycle shop. By 13, I was selling mopeds for him and motorbike accessories.

13:08And your brother and sister, one is older, one is younger. Who are they? What are their names? Yeah, my brother David, a very smart guy. Different from me, my brother David. He went to school, went to Wall Street. but uh you know you're tired uh at a young age he was like 52 when he retired i'm 62 still going strong that was my brother's personality he's a golfer he probably plays 180 days of golf a year uh he's uh you know we're motivated differently you know my my brother has uh i think my brother dealt with the brunt of our family upbringing more heavily than me as the oldest child in some ways He was like a, he probably shielded me from some of that, you know, and we developed different addictions.

13:57You know, he ended up unfortunately addicted to drugs and he cycled in and out of drug addiction for the last 40 years. And thank God, touch wood, he's clean now. I probably took some of that financial anxiety and family dysfunction and channeled it into work addiction. Your system? Way more normal than the two of us. most women are, frankly. She was more functional. She went to get a fashion degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She's a personal, she's a high-end personal shopper for a New York clientele. She does very well. Describe yourself now as a six-year-old living in this quite small house in this quite small town with these warring parents.

14:41Do you see, do you witness the rows or do you hear them happening in the kitchen when you're in your bedroom? Yeah, a combination of all that. I mean, I guess what happens when you're young and you're in a domestic war, that's your normal environment. You don't know what's normal and you don't know what's abnormal. When you get to be the third or fourth grade and you're observing other people's households and you have a tendency as a kid to idolize that stuff, you think maybe they're not fighting. They probably are. You don't know what's across the grass, the expression. But anyway, I would say as a six-year-old, I had a love affair for reading.

15:21I'm not exactly sure why. There was a gentleman I just dedicated and acknowledged him in my most recent book, which is coming out here in the UK in September. Charles Smith, who was a principal in my elementary school, he had a reading contest. I was in the first grade, and I won that contest. I read every one of those little, you know, C. Dick, Jane, Ron, and that sort of book in the first grade. And I remember my brother not believing that I had actually read all those books. But I did. I read all the books. And he really got me motivated and really probably caused my love affair with reading.

15:56But I think when your parents are fighting like that, you develop a couple of different survival skills. One is insulation. You become a little introverted. You become a little, you know, spend a lot of time reading. I spent a lot of time collecting comic books, trading cards. You sort of build your own little circle. Did you have a comic book hero? Well, I mean, do I have a comic book hero? You know, comic books are American mythology. So obviously Superman was my hero, but Batman is who we really are. You know, Superman is the idealization, right? And he's an interesting character from an American perspective.

16:33He's an immigrant. And did you identify with him as a little boy? Did you think? I wouldn't say that I identified with him. I would say that that was aspirational. That was the norm. You would want to be him. I think I identified more with Batman. Batman is who we are. Superman is who we want to be. Batman is very complex. I identified as Robin, but that probably explains too much. You identified as Robin? Yeah. All right. I like to be Robin. I was near the action. I was rather sweet. Yeah. I could see you with the mask on and the little green slippers. I think you would have done well. Why do you say we are Batman in a world where - We're Batman because we're very complex, right?

17:11If you read Damien by Hermann Hesse, there's an Abraxas, right? We have good parts to our personality and bad parts to our personality. We, of course, go into denial about the bad parts of our personality or the weaknesses or, you know, we think bad thoughts. We think good thoughts. We try to transform ourselves or create a transcendental experience. We always just want to think good thoughts, but we're a complex beast. There's a lot of primordial instincts in the nature of human beings that are mixed in with the self-awareness and the consciousness. And so Batman represents that. Batman's got a dark side to him.

17:49He's also bright and he's an idyllist. He's fighting crime. There's good versus evil in the story of Batman, but there's also good and evil in Batman himself. I think that's more representative of human beings. Superman is different. Did you dress up at all? Did you have a, because I did have a Superman costume. Did you have any of the. Yeah. I probably played all those characters as a kid, you know, and I probably, you know, I fell in love with Barbara Eden as a kid. Do you remember her? Was she the. She was the genie. You know, remember I dream a genie. Yes. And I have a, and one of the, one of the real fun parts of my life, because of my podcast, I got to meet Barbara Eden.

18:26She listens to my podcast and her agent called me and said, she'd like to come on and talk about her book. I was like, okay, we gotta, I got to go out on a date with Barbara. My wife gave me a free pass to go out on a date with the 94-year-old Barbara Eden. But, of course, the 94-year-old Barbara Eden brings the 93-year-old chaperone or husband. When I show up there, I'm like, what the hell are you doing here? I thought that this was a one-on-one. Get the hell out of here. He, of course, enjoyed that, John. He's a great guy. But I got a chance to have lunch with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

18:58It was great fun. Back to you as a six-year-old. Yeah. In your head, what is happening? Uh, close to my grandmother, uh, reasonably close to my mother. There's a lot of tradition, a lot of Italian tradition, lots of macaroni. I'm getting stuffed to the point of explosion. These people believe in overfeeding people. Church? Confirmation? Yeah, absolutely. Communion, confession, confirmation. Uh, I stole a pair of handcuffs, a pair of plastic handcuffs from a cubby of one of my classmates in kindergarten, which was absolutely devastating. I still remember to say he's talking about me as a six-year-old.

19:37I liked the handcuffs. I took them out of his cubby. I brought them home. My mother knew she didn't buy them for me, and she's scared to live in daylights out of me. We're going right to the church. My mother had a 1961 red interior white Ford Falcon. We're going right to the church, and you're going to tell that priest where you got these handcuffs. And I spilled the beans very quickly. I said, oh, my God, I stole these handcuffs. I had to go and replace them and apologize. And did you do that through the grill? I mean, not being a Catholic, I've never been to confession, but you go into a little booth, and the priest is the other side.

20:13So you asked me about my first memory. I'll tell you about my first confession. So you have to go to confession before you receive communion. And so I was in the booth telling the priest about, you know, I stole the handcuffs. I'm sorry about it. And, you know, by the way, it's a big lesson, you know. That was a big lesson for me because you live such an easy, such a simple life if you don't steal things. And if you live ethically and you abide by the general rules and so forth. I mean, I've been on Wall Street for 38 years. I have no UO4 violations. I have no ADV Part 1 violations. These are all the things from a regulatory person.

20:49I don't even have a personal trading account. I learned that from my grandmother. I learned that from my mother. It's better to be on the right side of things. Did you learn it from the priest that day? You confessed. There's a ritual. You have to say certain words, don't you? Yeah. There's an act of contrition. And you said, I stole these. And then did he say to you, you mustn't do this again? What happened? No, he was pretty conciliatory. You know, he was, I think, you know, that particular priest who was a good guy. I mean, some of these priests weren't, but that dude was a good guy. I think he was more, the more honest you were, the more dispensation you had from him.

21:25You know, if you were trying to, you know, make a move on him, I mean, he could have been pretty torturous. But he was a pretty good guy. I think I got out of that with a few Hail Marys and an Our Father or something like that. You know, you have to say this penance. That's the price you have to pay. That's like a fine. Yeah, exactly. Those are big lessons, though, because, you know, I'm still a practicing Catholic. You know, a lot of Europe, Italy has secularized, but I've got that from my parents, but mostly from my grandmother. You know, I still have my Catholic faith. And again, there's a great mystery here.

21:59None of us know the answers to it. I'm not suggesting that I do, but I carry my faith with me. That's part of that pro-noia that I'm describing. You know, I believe that if you're, you know, the karmic activity, you're going to have good things and bad things that happen to you in life. but look at the bright side of it and try to enjoy the ride. So at school, you're doing well? Very well. Very well. This is the primary school. I'm not trying to brag, but we're having this very honest conversation. So I was able to whip through the school, and I had very good retention, very good core memory, could memorize things very quickly.

22:37I don't want to say it was photographic, but if I could get through something and I get it comprehended pretty quickly. And did that make you popular, unpopular? You know, I wasn't really that focused on that at the time. You know, I was tall, which is sort of a great irony. You know, somebody asked me, what was I like in high school? And I laughed and said, well, I peaked in middle school, actually. I was like 5 '8 in the eighth grade. And I had these guys that were this tall that became 6 '1", or six foot one, and they just tower over me now. But back in the day, I was like the center on the basketball team.

23:17Imagine that, right? So sort of a weird thing. I grew up tall. And were you into sport? Yeah. I was a pretty good athlete. I lettered in the varsity sports in my high school. I was the captain of my football team. At that time, I was shorter than some of the football players. I played quarterback on the team. I had a pretty good idea. I could read the defense. And you were busy all the time. Fast. You were busy at school. You were busy at sports. And from the age of 11, you were earning money because you needed to. Did you give the money to your mother? I did. Yeah. I did, yeah. And you did it because actually I'm helping out.

23:52It was an alleviation of some anxiety. There was some tension in that house related to money. And so not that we were in want. I don't, again, I would never, I want to emphasize that. It was just tension. You know, I feel the pain of the people today that are really caught in the crosshairs of the affordability crisis. I have empathy for them because a lot like my mom and dad, and this is one of the things I said to me, you talk about your idealization of your life. I'm sure you had these moments. We said, I'm going to grow up and I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. And in my mind as a teen, I said, okay, I'm going to have my own business.

24:29I'm going to control my own destiny so nobody else can. I'm going to go get myself educated. I've got to start my own business. I've got to build my own company. And this way I can, you know, work and control my environment. Did you share these thoughts with anybody when you were a teenager? I did. Who did you share them? Well, probably everybody. You know, if you were in my high school class and you said to me, what the hell do you want to do? I would have told you I'm going to go to law school. And you say, well, why are you going to law school? I went to law school because the starting salaries in these law firms were double.

25:02I mean this is talking about a first year 25 year old were double what my dad was making on his construction job and so I'd like to tell you that it was a deeper analysis than that it wasn't it's very superficial I said okay I need to make money I'm gonna go to law school this will guarantee that I'll have some type of affordability when I got to law school I realized that wasn't my calling you know funny thing is you know I ended up going to Harvard law school my mother was like she thought it was Hartford law school she had no clue I mean these guys were going to take me to Hartford, Connecticut on Labor Day weekend.

25:31She had the Hagstrom map out. She's like, we're going to Hartford. We're not going to Hartford, no. It's down the block from Tufts. They didn't have any clue. And that was a good thing for me because I didn't have any. My folks were just like, if you go to college, you're the man. If you go to law school, you're the man squared. They had no clue. They didn't know the difference between Tufts University, Harvard, NYU. They didn't understand the status. So how did it come into your head? How did you begin to understand it as a teenager that there was such a thing as Tufts and Harvard School? Well, John Zanetti, this is a funny story.

26:11I told this story, I actually wrote this story on LinkedIn. And to my amazement, a few people wrote back to me from that local high school. And I'll tell you this story because it's a story about teachers and teachers making an impact and guidance counselors. because what ended up happening is I got into a few schools. One of them was Tufts. The other were state schools, and they were a lot cheaper. And John Zanetti was an Italian-American. He came to my parents' home, and we had this little small kitchen. It was a table bigger than this, but it was off this hallway kitchen, and my mother was serving espresso in these cast iron pots from the 1940s.

26:51I mean, the espresso was coming out like motor oil, okay? how these people survived this i have no idea we would both be dead from it but they were pouring this motor oil espresso 8 p.m at night smoking cigarillos i mean you you said to me what do i remember in in at age six a lot of smoke in the house i mean these people were smoking like chimneys okay but there they were in 1982 and zanetti in italian actually it was more like napoli donna was like an italian dialect was telling my mom and dad that you got to send Anthony to the private school. You got to send him to Tufts, better education.

27:25He'll meet more people. It's down the block from Harvard. He's got the right academic credentials where he'll do quite well there. And my father said he couldn't afford it. And it was a big differential at the time. And Zanetti said to him, hey, Anthony's an industrious kid. He'll figure it out. He'll take some loans. He'll work. He'll figure it out. That's my recommendation. My father listen to him and in april of 1980 82 a seminal moment for me he handed me a check and it was uh ten thousand dollars it was made out to tufts university and he had cashed his union life insurance policies your dad my dad yeah so this was the cash value of his life insurance and he handed it to me and he says what i got and i had some savings from my work and I made it work.

28:12But when he handed me that, I think that was the day I became an adult, actually. If I'm really going to be honest and reflective, it was a little bit of a Long Island Guido. You're from the UK. You don't probably understand that expression. So I'm going to give it to you, okay? I was wearing gold chains. I had my hair blown back like Tony Manero from Saturday Night Live, okay? I was doing push-ups in the parking lot at the local discos, okay? You know, like you were going to go to the disco. You get out of the car, you do some push-ups. Make sure your chest looks right. I used to go into these discos.

28:43You really want to hear how crazy I was? I had extra shirts in the car. So let's say I went up to Michelle in the disco. I said, would you like to dance? And she rebuffed me and said, no. I would go back to the car. I would change my shirt and put a new shirt on. And I'd go back in and say, you know, Michelle, it had to be the shirt. You know, what about now? Okay, I'll tell you, that would work. It does work. Oh, it worked. And let me tell you, I was that sort of Goomba, Long Island Guido. And, yeah, I was driving around in a Camaro. I bought myself a used car. And how old do you now? 18. That's the thing.

29:18Well, I was 18 at that time. But when my dad handed me that check, that's the day I became an adult. Honestly, I looked at that check. I will never forget it for as long as I live. I said, wow, this is so important to my parents. I don't want to blow this for them. I'm going to go to Tufts. I'm going to like really hone in and I'm going to see what I can do in terms of my GPA and my - GPA? Grade point average. You know, I don't know how they do it here in the UK, but you know, you get A's and B's and they count for certain numbers. And a high GPA, of course, would get me entrance into a big fancy graduate school.

29:56But I will say this to you, Johns and Eddie changed my life because going to Tufts was the gateway into Harvard. Harvard was the gateway into Goldman. And then, of course, I was able to build my career. And I just want to point out and reemphasize this. When I told that story on LinkedIn, there were several people from Port Washington that wrote back to me and said I had a very similar experience with John Zanetti. So if you're a teacher listening or you're a guidance counselor out there listening, you're having a big impact on people, do the right thing for them. They remember it long, decades later.

30:40And your father, my gosh, giving you basically his life savings. He did. Yeah. It's a good investment for him. I always pointed that out for him. You know, I took care of my folks. You know, I still do take care of my mom. I lost my dad in September of 2023. Oh, very recently. Yeah, 19... He was born in 1935. He died at age 88. Had the energy gone out of their rows towards the end? Were they any happier? yeah uh no no that was brutal i mean that was brutal it was like an unbelievable podcast i mean just drawing everything out of me with rosebud but you know my mother is back dating her high school boyfriend okay which we're all getting a kick out of you know he looks a little bit like uncle fester now from the adams family but you know god bless you know have at it you know what i mean it's wonderful i just said if you're gonna have kids with them just make me the you know, the godfather.

31:31That's what I told her, you know. Gosh. But isn't that human life? I mean, come on, you gotta, you're here for a minute, you might as well live your life, you know. And were they ultimately, we're going to go back to your child in a moment, but were they proud of you and your achievements? Did you, did you, obviously partly, you've been working, you've been achieving all this to say, look, I've done it. You gave me everything, I've now tried to. My parents were proud of me, but I think that the biggest thing for me is, you know, I mean, this is a real moment of, you know, direct honesty, you know, I always thought my parents were going to run out of money.

32:04They didn't, you know, I was always a reasonably smart kid and I was looking at my dad's salary and his income and the inflation, which has been pernicious and regressive in a society because, you know, working class people, the inflation absolutely crushes them. They don't own any assets. So, you know, you make a dollar and you weaken the dollar by eight cents, you'd have 92 cents of purchasing power. You have my own house and you weaken the dollar or the value of the house goes up. You know, you have some inflation hedges. And so, you know, for my folks, I always knew they were going to run out of money.

32:37So it gave me great pride to step in there and provide the subsidy for them that they needed to stay in their home to get the right medical attention. I wanted my folks and, you know, again, I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. So I try to take care of a lot of my family members. If you're going to live a part of the American dream and you grow up the way I did, you got to bring the people with you. But all this achievement and the wealth that's come with it are because of your addiction to work and an addiction to achievement. I think it's intellectual curiosity. It's not. The addiction thing is a mistake.

33:11I shouldn't say that. No, I think it's accurate. No, no, I think it's important to say because when you grow up in a traumatizing family, you do develop some compulsions. Because other members of the family. Your brother was addicted? No? My brother had a cocaine addiction. Yeah, he's a recovering addict right now. I have more than one person in my family that has various levels of addiction, whether it's alcoholism or gambling or et cetera. So if you see me at a party and you don't see me drinking, it's not that I'm a teetotaler. It's just that I've tried to avoid some of the genetic weaknesses that I've observed in my family.

33:49I'm just trying to protect myself from it. I'm not righteous about it or anything like that. I'll have a glass of champagne with you. but I'm not a drinker and I've generally avoided drinking because of the proclivities that I saw in my family. And I wanted to break out of where I grew up and I wanted to, and by the way, you have to understand this and I think you'll get this more than most because you're an empathetic person. I'm going from a blue collar family where my dad's wearing a greenie, which is a green uniform that's loaded with grease at the end of the day that he's throwing into a cleaning drum.

34:23drum. So there were no country clubs. There were no, uh, sporting occasions. I can't hit a golf ball or swing a tennis racket. And now I'm going to my first job interview at Goldman Sachs and I'm in a hundred percent polyester. I'm wearing a$90 suit. I've got a polyester shirt on that had like a, a sheen to it. I have a black tie on, by the way, I think I look fantastic, which tells you how stupid I was. And the Goldman Sachs partner's looking at me like, all right, this guy's a really smart kid, but you, you're dressed like an Italian undertaker from Brooklyn. I mean, the guy had to pull me aside.

34:59He's like, dude, you got to buy some natural fiber clothing. I mean, you're ready to, you're like fully flammable for the job interview. You know, I'm like looking at him going, I didn't know any better. You know, I'm like calling my mother. She's like, and you know, Italian mother's like, you look great. I don't know what he's talking about. You look fantastic. I said, mom, I don't think I look fantastic. I had to go get a credit card. I went to Brooks Brothers. I bought myself some shirts and a tie, and I went back down to Goldman. I mean, I've gone from polyester to Brioni in my life, but I didn't know better.

35:30And I think it's an important story to tell because there's young kids out there that are aspirational. You got to go through that self-consciousness. You got to go through that rite of passage. Speaking of rites of passage, let's go back to your teenage years. The Long island guido yeah long island guido yeah definitely and the girls what was your first experience of a girl oh not one who was not on the tv one that you would actually meet well i you know we played spin the bottle did you play spin the bottle here in in the uk yes of course we did we all around spin the bottle and whoever it's pointing at your wife is here don't give up too too much information you'll end up getting hit with something later probably careful but you said it and you end up Kissing the person that the bottle points towards.

36:14Yeah, so I did a lot of that. That was a popular game. Yeah, it was a popular game in the sixth grade, yeah. And one of the keys was to get invited to one of the spin-the-bottle parties. So if you were one of the cool kids, if you got invited to one of those parties, they had a little spinning of the bottle. And were you something of a Romeo? I use the word advisedly, given your Italian heritage. You know, I had girlfriends. I would say that, you know, I'm thinking. Say this about me that I, you know, if you ask people from my high school, I think they would say this about me that I, you know, I was president of my high school.

36:48I was captain of the football team and I was probably in the jock category, like with the athletes. But I was also a little bit of a nerd. And I think people sometimes when they see me and they look at me physically, they don't realize what a bookworm I am. I don't realize what a nerd I actually am. And so I would say in high school, and I think I've imparted this to my children. and I have five of them, except no cliques. If someone wants you to be in a clique and wants to divide you from other people, don't do it. I would sit at all the various tables in the high school cafeteria. You were your own man, and you quickly became the Mooch.

37:23Was that a nickname given to you at high school? 1972. I was eight years old. We had this very tough German immigré who was our phys ed teacher, and he just decided that all of us multi-syllable last-named kids, he didn't have a little bit of a disdain for our ethnicity. And so he would pick one of the syllables of our last names and that was our name. So this poor guy, I think his name is Krajewski, he used to call him Cray and ended up being called Cray-Cary for like 10 years. The third syllable of my last name is Mooch, Scaramucci. He called me Mooch, it stuck. I think I even had it on my varsity jacket.

38:04Was your first setback when you joined Goldman Sachs, but left after a year? So I got fired after 18 months. Now, why? Because you've been rising, rising, rising. And by then you were in the Brooks Brothers outlet. You looked the part. I had a Burberry, like white collar. I was looking pretty fancy. And Goldman Sachs is essentially an investment bank. Yeah, it's probably the top tier of the investment banks. I was in the real estate investment banking area. I always tell young kids, I took that job due to my insecurity. And so I was a 25-year-old coming out of Harvard. What job should I want? Well, I made the mistake.

38:41The job you should want is the one you're good at or the one you actually like. I didn't do that. I wanted the status job. I had insecurity. The coolest, hottest job at that time was real estate investment banking. and I wanted to go to that cocktail party at the end of the school year and watch me. I wanted to have my little pinky finger in the air like this and I wanted to tell my classmates that I got the job that they wanted. Eat your hearts out. I'm a real estate investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Look at the pinkies, eh? But here's the problem with that. That's what really happened to me, okay?

39:15Because what ended up happening is I sucked at the job. And so now I'm in the job, I'm working very hard, but I don't really understand the job that well. The firm goes into a downturn because of the Iraq war. A lot of our recessions, unfortunately, in my career have been inducted by Middle Eastern wars. But anyway, we're in the Iraq war in 1990. The partner running the area fired me on February 1st, 1991. You could look it up. It was a Friday. He took me to his apartment. He was a nice man. He got me a beer out of the refrigerator. I sat on his sofa and he said, you're fired. And he said, the reason you're fired is you actually suck at the job.

39:54And I could save you because you're a good person. Everybody likes you. You're a hard worker. But you really do suck at the job. You need a different job. And I always tell young kids, when you're getting fired like that, the first move is because the guy that's firing you is having a tough day too. Say, hey, would you be willing to help me? Would you act as a reference for me? And that's what I asked them. And I'm going to really set the scene for you. Because I'm fired on a Friday night. I go to the bank on Saturday. I get four rolls of quarters. There's no cell phones back then. If there were, I couldn't afford one.

40:25And I took the train back into the city. I was pumping quarters into pay phones in the train terminal. And I was calling people. And I had resumes printed up. I was looking for a job. 27 years old. Somewhat humiliating. I had got hired at Goldman Sachs. Started on August 14th, 1989. fired February 1st. It was somewhat humiliating. And so now I'm looking for a job. And one of my buds tells me, hey, there's a job opening at Goldman Sachs in a different area. It was more of a sales area, an investment research area. I think you're well suited for that job. So then I called the guy who fired me and I said, Michael, would you be willing to put a good word in for me and at least get me the interview.

41:14Give me the opportunity to interview with these people. And he said, of course I'm willing to do that. He got me the interview and I got rehired. But they gave me an$11 ,000 severance check the day I got fired. So I cashed it. You know, I needed it for natural fiber clothing. I needed it for my school debt, all the shit that I was doing. And so when they rehired me, I got rehired on March 28th. So I was out of a job for about eight weeks, the woman that rehired me or the personnel person, she called and she said, hey, got really good news for you. We're just going to mark you down as interdepartmental transfer.

41:51We're not going to have to tell anybody that you got fired. I said, oh, that's great. Can we get the$11 ,000 check back, please? I looked at her. I said, actually, no, I've already spent the money. I said, if you want to tell everybody, someday I'm going to be on the Rosebud podcast 40 years later. I'm going to tell these guys I got fired. I mean, I don't give a shit. And so that woman, who is now retired, she's still around, she marked me down in a departmental transfer. But I got fired. I don't mind owning my mistakes. I was ill-suited for the job. I got rehired. I spent a total of seven years at Goldman.

42:25And pursuant to my goals, when I paid off my school debt, I left and started my own company. And where we are now with the latest company, which is Skybridge, we can't go through all the ups and downs of your career, that is worth what skybridge this is the ultimate company that you built the business i mean i know it's probably worth a couple hundred million dollars i i don't know i mean it's a private company uh you know when i was going into the white house uh i had a offer to purchase the company a few years back at 250 million dollars uh i subsequently didn't do that because you know i got fired so quickly i really and i really didn't want to give up the company so i went back to the company how do you end up at the white house how does that happen so i ended up in the White House because I'm a prolific political fundraiser.

43:08I've raised a ton of money for different politicians. I'm working for Jeb Bush. I know Trump for multiple decades. Jeb Bush was in Florida. Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida. He was the son of George Herbert Walker Bush and the brother of George Walker Bush. He was running for president in 16. He was the former very successful governor of Florida. He raised a boatload of money. Helped by you. And he got slayed by Trump. And Trump called me and said, hey, come work for me. Give us a, Trump called you. This is a phone call. A phone call, yeah. From Trump. Had you met him over the years? Yeah, so I had a, again, I would never qualify myself as a friend of Donald Trump's.

43:47If you're qualifying yourself as a friend of Donald Trump's, you either are exaggerating the relationship or you lack self-awareness. So he doesn't have friends. You're a transaction in his field of vision. and if you understand that, that's great. Transact with them if you want, but you're transacting with them at your peril because everybody gets blown up one way, shape, or form. But there's always a rotisserie, and I'm including myself, and this doesn't reflect well on me, but there's a carousel of people that will join the Trump chorus that will get back slapped by him and then back stabbed by him and then lit up by him.

44:21That's what happens, right? So you have to understand that. So a phone call comes through. So the phone call comes through. He invites me to breakfast. I got a breakfast. What do you have for breakfast? I just have coffee, actually. It's a late breakfast. I go to the 26th floor of Trump Tower. He's sitting at his desk. He's just got this way about him. His desk is perched up here. Your chair is perched down there. You're looking up at him. Yes, Mr. Trump. He's looking down at you with the lips and shit. and he's like that. And he's telling me, and this was the day after The Apprentice ended. It was the Apprentice finale.

45:02It was the night before. Which is his big TV show. Big TV show. And did you see me last night on The Apprentice? I'm like, no, I didn't see you. You were the only one. The ratings were fantastic and the hands are moving and everything that you would expect from him. And he said, but that's over now. I'm running for president. And I laughed. I looked at him. You're not running for president. I said, when I was watching Fox News last night while you were operating The Apprentice, they had you at 2 % in the polls. And then Trump said, and I'll never forget this, he said, yeah, that's because people are like you.

45:36They don't believe me. When I run for president and I announce I'm really running, I'm going to shoot to the top of the polls and I'm going to win the presidency. And you should come work for me. And I said to him, well, first of all, I still don't believe you. I think it's a publicity stunt. I said, but I'm with Jeb Bush and I'm not going to break, you know, I've been Republican fundraiser for multiple decades and just, it would be disloyal for me to do that. And to Trump's credit, he actually respected that. Although we did call Jeb low energy at that time. And I laughed. I said, he doesn't have low energy, but it turned out maybe he did have a little bit of low energy.

46:11But anyway, he said to me, if I knock Jeb out of the race, will you come work for me? And so I've made a lot of stupid decisions in my life, but that was a big one. I said yes. And I shook his hand. He knocked Jeb out of the race. His assistant called me. I went to go work for him. And you went to work for him as a fundraiser because that was your record. Yeah. I went to work for him as a fundraiser. I was also hosting a show for Fox Business called Wall Street Week. I was a business commentator on the air. And so I had, I had a perch to provide some, you know, media for him. And I had some, a perch to provide some media exposure for the campaign.

46:50So I had, I wore a couple of different hats. You know, I was providing media support and advocacy. I was raising money for him. I was reviewing things that were going out. I had some say on some of the speeches and so forth. And was he calling the shots? Did he phone you? How did it work? Yeah, very much. Did he call you the moosh? Did he call you Anthony? No, he always called me, interestingly enough, he always called me Anthony. You know, he's a pretty formal guy. You know, by the way, I never called him Donald or anything like that. I always called him Mr. Trump. And when he became president, I called him Mr.

47:21President. And I've been told by many people his personal manner is quite charming. No question. And he has a good sense of humor. He's got a good sense of humor. He can be charming in small spaces. I got on with him. I'm not going to BS people. I got on with him. I didn't work for him. I worked for him for nine months. I was on the plane with him. I did 71 campaign stops. I raised lots of money for him, gave lots of money. I provided media advocacy. Jared Kushner once said that I reminded him of Fred because I had my own. Fred? Fred Trump. He liked me because I built my own business. Yeah. And he liked me because I was my own guy.

47:59And so I wasn't these obsequious political hacks that were hanging around with him. I would tell him what I thought, irrespective if it hurt his feelings or not. I was pretty direct with him. He was appreciative of that during the campaign. When I was in the White House, he didn't like it at all. So you become. That cost me. He appointed you as the communications secretary. The first move was he made me part of the executive transition committee. People don't remember that, but for those 12 weeks, I was interviewing cabinet officials, sub-cabin officials. I was working on building the cabinet.

48:29I was working on building the ambassadorships. You were excited because he's president now. Did you think this is going to work? Well, again, this doesn't reflect well on me, but let's have the conversation. I didn't think he was going to win. I went to work for him. He didn't think he was going to win. I can tell you on the evening of the election in conversation with me, he certainly didn't think he was going to win. And he admits that even. When he won, I think we were all shocked, including himself. And then we had to build the cabinet. And so we were in a very manic rush to do all of that.

49:04And that was very exciting. And then that's when the hook, unfortunately, went through my eyeball. So if you've ever fished, you know, I caught the fish, but I happened to be the fish. And the hook came right through my eyeball. And I was sucked into the whole thing. So I let my, again, it doesn't reflect well on me, but I let my pride and my ego get the best of me. I had this whole self-narrative going. I'm a blue-collar kid, went to Tufts and Harvard. I built a couple of successful businesses, worked at Goldman. Oh, my God, now I can go work for the American president. My wife thought the American president was batshit crazy.

49:41I mean, she probably hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. And she was like, basically like, hey, man, don't do it. You should not do this. And I didn't listen to her. And I paid the price. I paid the price. And how did you pay the price? Because you do eventually, once he actually becomes president, you are appointed. What was your role? So the people don't remember this. So I was the OPL director. So what is that? I was the Office of Public Liaison. And so that was supposed to be sort of a global networker for the president. I was supposed to have an office in the West Wing. I was supposed to work with the president.

50:14on building his relationships with governmental officials in the United States and business leaders. It was a pretty cool job actually. But Reince Priebus, the Wisconsin chief of staff, who was the foreign RNC chair, he really didn't like me. And he was like a little bit of a howdy duty guy, meaning like he was all passive aggressive, nice to me, like a, you know, Wisconsin, Midwestern howdy duty guy while he was stabbing my ass in the back. You know, I mean, I'm more of a front stabber. I mean, this son of a bitch was like a backstabber, right? And so he was, you know, play acting niceness to me while he was like dropping stories.

50:51He was just really trying to create havoc for me. He must have thought I was stupid because a lot of the reporters talked to me about exactly what he was doing, right? And of course, me being me, I called him out on it, which caused him to go even crazier. And I got that job stalled out on me. And so, but Trump, I had the blue badge. It was the lanyard that you wear to pass into the White House and the West Wing, etc. And so I had the blue badge, and I had access to the White House from January 20th until the day I got fired. So people don't remember that, but Trump told me, don't give up the badge.

51:28I'm going to find you a job. You and Priebus don't get along. I'm going to find you a job. Don't worry. And then on the 20th of July, he called me. He brought me in. I had lunch with him in the study off the Oval. What did you eat? I had a club sandwich. Trump actually didn't eat anything. He had like 14 Diet Cokes. He's like a manic. I'm surprised his kidneys are working as well. I mean, this guy must drink like four gallons of Diet Coke a day. And we were sitting there, and he said to me, I want you to come work for me. You're right about Priebus and Bannon. I got to get rid of them. Because I thought they were very bad guys, by the way, and I still believe that.

52:07And I said, okay, no problem. I said, what job do you want me to have? And this is like the height of my stupidity and arrogance and egocentrism. He calls the White House Director of Operations. He says, what offices are available here in the West Wing? Well, it turns out that the Director of Communications Office is available. Mike Dubke had gotten fired or let go three months earlier. And that office is down the hall from the Oval. And Trump hangs up the phone. And he goes, you're my communications director. And I did at least have enough self-awareness to say, I can't be your communications director.

52:42I don't have any experience being a communications director. Oh, no, relax. This is the Trump charm, you know. Relax, we're going to have a good time. You know, you'll figure it out. We all just figured this all out together. And, you know, and you're going to help me get rid of Priebus and Bannon, and it's going to be great. And it's literally what he said, and I just had the hook in my eye, and he was reeling me in, and I bought the whole thing. and then the very next day, you know, and by the way, that evening, that White House Ops guy called Priebus and Bannon and told them I'm coming in as the comms director, but he was big footing them.

53:16And then that's when the fight broke out and Bannon and Priebus were calling me nonstop that night. Of course, I didn't take their calls. The very next morning, I was having coffee at the Trump hotel. They called me and I said, how about we meet in the chief of staff's office before the 10 o 'clock meeting with Trump and they were ripping into me. You can't do this. You're this, you're that. But I say, guys, you, you know, you try to stop me from getting the job. Trump wants me to have the job. And that is pride. And that is ego. And that is general manly stupidity. And by the way, I have to own that for the rest of my life.

53:52And, uh, I'll continue to own it. But Trump might've been right. You might've done the job. Well, why did it, why? Well, I was never going to be able to do the job well, because you have to understand Washington, the knives were already out for me. And then Trump did something to me on that first day, which made it impossible for me to stay. Okay, and I'll tell you what he did. He was so pissed off at them. He looked at Previce in the 10 o 'clock meeting and he said, I don't want your filth and your stink on him. And he told Rob Porter, the White House press secretary, he, meaning me, reports directly to me.

54:24So if you read the press release from the White House on the 21st of July, It said Scaramucci's coming in. He's going to report directly to the president. That was very bad. Why is that very bad? Because when the new chief of staff comes in after we fire Priebus, he's not going to like that. You know, it's not, you know, you've got to be under the chief of staff. And, of course, Kelly didn't like that. And Kelly's first official act was to fire me. And, by the way, I mean, John and I are very good friends. My wife, Deirdre, and Karen Kelly, and myself and John, we socialized together. I saw them two weeks ago.

54:57And so it's important when you're in politics and you get your ass kicked the way I did, don't take it personally and don't be a baby. So you felt you weren't able to do the job, but you were hooked in. They didn't want you in there, certainly not having direct contact with the president. Why did he let you go since he decided you were going to be? So Trump let me go because I was fighting with him. So Trump had decided, which he's now executing in the second term way more effectively than he executed in the first term. He wants to do certain things a certain way. Some of them may be crossing the line with the Constitution.

55:33There may be some legal breaches. And Trump was literally pushing me to do things that I wasn't capable of doing. He sent Sean Spicer out to say that he had the biggest audience of any inaugural. And there's nobody there. And Obama had like seven times the amount of people. and this poor son of a bitch and this, he had a terrible suit, by the way. The suit was up here like this and he's at the podium saying he had a great, I was like, okay, well, I'm not doing that. I work on Wall Street. If I buy shares from you, it's over the phone. I call you up and say, hey, I'm buying a thousand shares of Citibank.

56:10I'm buying it from you. Let's say Citibank plummets 50 points. I still own it. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna ruin my 35 year at that time, at least reputation on Wall Street. Trump was telling me, well, do this and say that. I said, I'm not doing that. So I pissed him off. And then Kelly was very honest with me. It was very hard for me to be. I can't be, you can't have that kind of intrigue. It would have been fair to John. So I got fired. But when I got fired, man, did I get lit up. I got lit up by all the late night comedians. I got lit up by the cable news pundits. It was nine years later, guys.

56:47We're still talking about it. It was brutal.

56:59but did you feel humiliated by it oh very much so yeah of course among many other feelings there was humiliation there was shame there was self-consciousness There was general awkwardness. There was pissed offness at myself because I fell into an ego-based trap. And I should have been smarter than that or more self-aware than that. And then I was having a problem with my wife. And people don't remember this, but I missed the birth of my son, James. Tell us about your wife. This is your first wife. Second wife. Your second wife. What happened to your first wife? Let's deal with her briefly. Oh, you know, we got married.

57:41When did you get married? I got married at age 24 in 1988. She's a lovely person. You'll never hear me say anything towards my first wife. She was a great mom. I have three beautiful kids with her. We just were not matched 100%. And so - Was she Catholic? Yeah, so that's the thing. Like Catholics, we stayed married. I didn't probably make the mistakes of my mom and dad and stay married for 65 years. I mean, we were married for 22. There was some difficulty in the marriage. And I think we're both a lot happier now. And you had three children together. I had three children. And by the way, she got a very handsome divorce settlement, and I gave her a 10-year payout.

58:26I wanted to make sure that she was financially comfortable. And I also took care of all the kids' expenses, the tuitions, all the things that they needed. She's a good person. Because if I made a mistake in my first marriage, the big mistake as a result of the way I got raised, I was a bit of a conflict avoider. Because when you grow up in a violent household, you can replicate the violence or you're trying to self-parent and you're trying to figure, okay, I got to get out of here. That's bad behavior. But let me tell you what isn't good behavior. Violence is bad behavior. Conflict avoidance is actually also bad behavior.

59:06You've got to get here into the middle where you're able to express what you like and dislike about something. And so if I'm being brutally honest, my first marriage, I probably didn't have the self-awareness or the communication skills or the understanding of the appropriate boundaries. And you were working all the time. And I was working all the time. If you'd gone to confession, maybe you did go to confession during this period, what would the first thing have been that you would want to confess in relation to that first marriage? Well, the first thing I would confess, I didn't handle the marriage well.

59:37Whatever, I mean, marriages are probably, you have to probably say they work because two people are working at it. They probably don't work. I don't think it's 100-0 in a marriage breaches. I could take 70 % of the blame. I don't think I can take 100 % of the blame. But I think for me, my conflict avoidance contributed to the failure of that marriage. So if you were my father confessor, I'd say, yeah, I didn't have enough self-awareness at that point in my life to, hey, this isn't working. In order for this to work for me, these are the things that I need. And if you can't provide those things, let's be fair and amicable with each other and find other relationships.

1:00:14I didn't handle it that way. And how quickly did you find your second wife? Or did you find her during your first marriage? Yeah, well, it was towards the end of my first marriage, but I found my second wife through work. I had actually merged in with a company. She was the investor relations person at the company. And is she Catholic? She's Lutheran. Yeah, so she's German and Norwegian and Italian, but she got raised Lutheran. It's a similar religious theology. I mean, it's more or less similar. And you had two children with her? Two children with her. I have a total of five children. And so this is the second one.

1:00:50But my second wife filed for divorce on me. Gosh, for what reason and when? Well, I mean, some misbehavior on my part. She didn't want me to go work for Trump. She thought I had lost my way in terms of what my priorities were and a lot of justifiable reasons, frankly. But I loved her. Thankfully, she loved me. So we were able to repair our marriage. But when I got fired from the White House, I just want to set the scene for you. I'm fired from the White House. My wife has filed for divorce on me. I'm getting excoriated by the papers, the cable news, comedians. I'm getting lit up by the late night comedians.

1:01:27And I missed the birth of my son. My son is born on the 24th of July. I'm in the middle of West Virginia with Donald Trump. There's a 60-mile no-fly zone around Air Force One. Deirdre is prematurely delivering. She's also pissed at me. The baby's supposed to be born in August. He's born early. She gives birth. I mean, it was a disaster. I mean, I'll just say, if it's not cancer, if you're having a bad day, pick up the phone and call me. I'll cheer you up. We'll do a comparator of analysis, okay? But anyway, I did everything I could to repair the marriage, go back and fix my relationships in business, fix my company Skybridge.

1:02:07And then I had to work on my public image. How did you fix the marriage? You changed your behavior? I think that's the best way to fix a marriage. I think the first way to fix, well, first of all, I'll make a very broad and general statement. I don't think your marriages should be disposable. You know, we have a tendency to dispose of everything in our world today. And I think you've got to work on your marriage. And so I loved her. I sort of had an instinct that she still loved me. Here are the problems in our marriage. How do we fix them? I don't know if you remember Tony Robbins, he's a big progeny figure in America.

1:02:44He's like a motivational speaker. He wrote the foreword to one of my books. He called me and he said, hey, you've got to fix yourself. he introduced me to somebody that worked with him as sort of like a life coach therapist and then I worked with Deirdre on the marriage and but I had to own this is why we're having such a revelatory and honest conversation I think you can't fix yourself unless you're open to being very honest with yourself about who you are and what your flaws are you're not going to fix yourself you're going to code it over and have an alibi watch me I'm the scarecrow from the wizard of Oz you know it's everybody else's fault other than mine then you're not going anywhere but if you say okay here's what i did wrong here are the things that i did wrong here's the ways i acted where there was levels of misbehavior or levels of callousness or whatever it might be um i think that's how you fix a marriage and also i will tell you that when i got my ass kicked like that at the white house that forced another perspective on me it was a humbling experience i listed all those other things, but another thing was humble pie.

1:03:49I was eating a lot of humble pie. And I think that made me more psychologically minded. Did you think through during this therapy and coming together, why, what had caused you the misbehavior? I can see the workaholic nature. I don't know if you were chasing or flirting with other women. If you were, did you work out why you were doing that? what the need was in you to be working all the time, to have this next success, to be with a girl who says, Anthony, you're the best. Did you think that through as well as, I've got to change my behavior? So this is the seminal question. Okay, so what causes that is external affirmation.

1:04:39Okay, and so we're all subject to it. We can pretend otherwise, but we want some external affirmation, right? We want the accreditation or we want the symbolism or the arm candy. You pick whatever it is that you aspire to for your external affirmation. And when you get a little bit older and a little bit more mature and you get a little bit more humbled in life and you've had this rough and tumble life experience like me, you start to recognize that that stuff is not really going to make you happy. You know, what's going to make you happy is the internal affirmation. You know, am I waking up this morning and what am I doing today?

1:05:19You know, and what do I represent to the world? And so for myself, I want to represent to the world some level of honesty, some level of humbleness, but paramount to everything. For me, particularly because of the way I was raised, kindness. I think it's very, very important. I see kindness. Some people in my business community would see kindness as a weakness. He doesn't make a lot of money. He's too kind or he's too generous to his employees or he does this or that. I see it as a superpower. I see it as a karmic piece of the algebraic equation of happiness. I think the kinder you are, the more karmic happiness that you derive.

1:06:03And so those are things that it took me some time to get through. So I understand. So the answer to your question is external affirmation is way less valuable. It's important to all of us. Let's not kid ourselves. But the internal affirmation and staying close to your family and finding somebody you really love that you can center your life around and care for is way more valuable to you and way more important. And by the way, you know, I'm here in London. I am still a little bit of a workaholic. I've got a podcast and a conference business, and I'm writing books, and I'm doing things. I'm not suggesting that I have the work-life balance figured out, but I do think I have a lot more self-honesty about what I'm doing.

1:06:49And I think I have a lot of self-comfort with it. Are you kind to your wife? You phone her while you're in London? Oh, very much so. Yeah, no. It's going okay? Well, knock on wood. I think we're the best. I mean, I don't even want to, I don't, lightning will hit me or something. I think that we're best that we've been. Good. And by the way, you know, you got to work on it. You're a Capricorn. What a shame. Well suited for me. She's a Taurus. Oh. But she's also, she's got a, her rising sign is in Leo. And I'm an Aries rising sign, which is an interesting thing for me because people see me very differently than the way I am.

1:07:24If you understand the signs, I'm representing my first impression is more fiery. but I'm actually more of a bookworm and a little bit more nerdy than people would probably expect. As we're discovering. I mean, you're interested in astrology. I mean, I mentioned being a Capricorn because that counts with you. I mean, you're intrigued by it. When is your birthday? Can you guess? I feel Virgo-ish to me, but I'm not sure. Well, I'm glad I give that impression. When is your birthday? I'm Pisces. Pisces, oh, wow. I'm Pisces and my wife. You're a tough son of a bitch. You drive her crazy. She's Pisces too.

1:07:54Oh, she is. We drive each other crazy. Fights got to be really rough. Very passionate, very passionate. Don't introduce me to a Scorpio. You don't do well? No, I get on terribly well. Oh, you do? I abandon the boundaries. Oh, yeah. An affirmation from a Scorpio. Well, just remember what they say. You know, the millionaires don't believe in astrology, but the billionaires do, you know? Remember J.P. Morgan had all that astrological readings in his library that they discovered, you know? Somebody predicted you died. You had an obituary published during your lifetime? I did, yeah. Was the obituary a generous one?

1:08:27No, it was really more of a one sentence that I died. Yeah, that was the Harvard Law School, the directory. I guess it was a couple of liberals that were operating the directory. When I was named the White House communications director, they changed my profile and they said he died on July 27th. I don't know. I mean, I'm still here. I mean, what did Mark Twain say? The reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. Do you have an epitaph in mind? I think you do now, actually. I think you would like it to be said that he was actually quite kind. That's it. He was a kind guy. I just said kindness is the virtue.

1:09:04Kindness is the virtue. Kindness is the virtue, yeah. Last three questions. Yeah, go ahead. A moment of joy just comes into your head. Maybe from your earlier years, any time, a moment of joy. My niece's graduation from her nursing school, you know, my sister didn't have a lot of money. I paid her tuition. I paid her room and board. I bought all of her books. You know, I'm probably saying that with less reluctancy than I should because it sounds like I'm patting myself on the back. I asked the question. But you asked the question. So for me to have the means to be able to take care of my children but have a little bit of enough of an excess to take care of my niece like that so that she didn't have the burden of the school debt that I had as a kid, that's a really powerful, very joyous feeling.

1:09:49And a moment of sadness. well i mean the original great sadness for me was the death of my grandmother uh that was probably you know my realization of our mortality i was a young kid and the italians are very rough with this death thing man i mean they they put her in a pink dress they leave the casket open i mean the italians are brutal with this shit i mean i think it was like a four-day wake and i was a nine-year-old kid and the stupid suit that i didn't fit into was probably too tight and i was staring at her for five days before they buried her. I think that's probably the saddest moment that I've had, even in many ways more sad than my dad, because, you know, my dad died when I was in my late 50s, and so I had already had lots of experience with death.

1:10:35Unfortunately, I lost friends of mine in 9-11, and there's been a lot of, you know, veterans that I know that have died. I mean, I didn't have any experience with death, so I would say that was the apex sadness. And it's a good way to end, because we began with her. Yeah, she was the best. She was a Virgo, by the way, very perfectionistic and very hard on herself. Okay, last question. Go ahead. What is your life lesson? What have you learned in your 62 years? Such a great question. I mean, you know, that's it. I mean, that's the lesson. you know I think the big lesson is is really you know I you know the adage I would say is really from Mel Brooks who's one of my uh intellectual heroes you know uh relax none of us are getting out of here alive you know just relax you know don't take it too seriously and what are you going to do right you know some of it is a folly right or Shakespeare said it's a stage and you you have your role in it I think that's the big thing is to be comfortable in your own skin and to accept things in life that you can't.

1:11:41I'm not changing my height anytime soon. I'm not going to change my ethnic background. I'm not going to change the origin of my birth. It's better to just seek comfort in all of it rather than to be upset about any of it. And by the way, if you were born in the UK, Canada, the United States, Australia, you pick one of these nations, I mean, you know, your chances of being born in the United States are like two and a half, three percent. You have a higher probability of being born in Africa or Asia, and so I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the planet. I'm pleased to hear that, and I'm very pleased to have spent this time with you, Anthony.

1:12:15It's been great. You're a great interviewer. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for joining us on RoastBot. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you.

1:12:29All my thanks there to Antonis Scaramucci, the Mooch. Well, I have to say my producer, Harriet Jane, and I really enjoyed meeting him. I hope he'll come back. And after we'd finished our conversation, because as you saw, it ended quite personally, I did ask him about the state of America and whether he was optimistic about the future of America. And I think his answer to that question was very, very intriguing. But it's a kind of postscript to what was a personal conversation. and so we're going to put it at the end of this episode. So stay tuned for a few more sentences from Anthony Scaramucci in a minute.

1:13:08But meanwhile, my real thanks to him. We will be going back to America, meeting more Americans in due course. We've been invited to New Zealand, incidentally. So if you've got guests you want us to have on Rosebud, do always, you can always drop us a line. You know, it's simply hello at rosebudpodcast.com. That's where you find us. Anyway, Harriet has left an email for me to read to you. I say she's left an email. She's in the corner of the room waving it at me. It says, it's from Mark Bramelt, and he writes, Dear Harriet and Giles, I recently went through a prolonged period of recovery after eye surgery, which meant that I couldn't read or watch television.

1:13:50This led me to your brilliant podcast, which helped me through a difficult time. Thank you. Although born in the UK, I've spent most of my adult life abroad and currently live in a very rural Brazil. It was therefore a joy to hear your beautiful voice, Giles, which reminds me of the way that people spoke in my childhood. I'm now, he's obviously much older than he sounds, late Victorian. My voice, incidentally, I think is Edwardian. My father was born in 1910 and I sound exactly like him. Can you imagine what it must be like for my son, who sounds exactly like me, sounding like an Edwardian. Well, perhaps it doesn't matter.

1:14:30He's a lawyer. OK, I'm now better and the eyes are working. Oh, that's brilliant news, Mark. Well done. I'm now better and eyes are working, but continue to follow you and have worked my way through the past guests. I live on a remote farm that is connected by badly maintained dirt tracks five miles away. I often listen to your podcasts in the car and usually pick up local people on the way whose first hearing of English is often your voice. How wonderful. I know that you ask about first memories, so thought I would tell you mine. My father was a rural dean in Wiltshire in the 1970s. I can remember a meeting of very important priests at our vicarage, perhaps even including the Bishop of Ramsbury, where I decided to push my push trolley over their very shiny shoed feet as they sat ready for a meeting.

1:15:27I can remember them being quite annoyed by this, which made me determined to complete the circle of feet ahead of me. This was in the day when children were still seen and not heard. I am a fan. Yours sincerely, Mark Bramelt. Well, Mark, I am now your number one fan. I can see it. The rural dean, the bishop, the archdeacon, the presenter from the local cathedral, the new aspiring vicar, all sitting in a circle, waiting for the meeting to begin. In comes this child with its pushchair and solemnly goes over each pair of shiny shoes. Well done, you. That's a lovely memory. Thank you so much. And I'm very excited to think there will be Brazilian people who are being introduced to the English language through me.

1:16:12Let's finish now. So here, as a postscript, is a little touch, a little extra touch of Anthony Scalamucci. Thank you for your company. And if you are an American, congratulations on your 250th birthday. Harriet and I are sending you very best wishes. We love your country. We look forward very much to coming back soon. Meanwhile, a last word from Anthony Scalamucci. And after him, we'll simply cue the music. We're putting this out around the 4th of July. Okay. 250 years after the founding of the United States of America. Are you a proud American, and are you optimistic about the next 250 years for your country?

1:16:54Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to say it with a false level of optimism. There's things that I'm worried about. There's pockets of things that I'm worried about. Generally, I'm very optimistic. You know, we've always had veins of populism in the country. while Jennings Bryant was put down, the first America First movement was put down by Franklin Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin led those movements. I'm a little concerned that those movements are in power right now. I think that's a problem for us. We're going to have to correct. But I'll submit to you this. It's a very young country.

1:17:29Your king, and we started with this before we went on the air, he said 250 years ago, and then your king paused and said, or as we say in England, just the other day, I thought it was such a brilliant line, is something people should think about about America. It's a very young country. It is an experiment. It's not based on a bloodline or an island or natural borders. It's based on an idea. It's teeming with immigrants, my family included. And so when the immigrants wave into the country, they change the culture. There's constant evolution and neuroplasticity to the culture. and it's more of a pop culture than an ancient culture like England or say France or Italy, which dates back to the Roman Empire, the Greeks back to the Parthenon.

1:18:12And so what happens in America is when we lose our institutional living memory, we dunk ourselves. And so America is about to go through it again. It's already going through it. We dunk ourselves pretty hard every 80 years, but we'll pick ourselves up because it's that kind of a country. I think there's a lot of very smart people. As I pointed out to you, I'm writing a book that comes out in September where I address some of the things I think we got wrong. Not blaming anybody in the book. It's sort of an indictment of good intentions gone bad, where we make policy decisions from the left or right that we think are going to go a certain way.

1:18:47They don't. And how do we get ourselves out of the current situation? And so I believe that with enough people talking about it, enough smart people activating on it, we'll reform it. We've done it before. I mean, we almost broke the country up in the mid-1860s. We can fix it. So I think the next 250 years are going to show a resilient country and a country that can still bring in the intellectual capital from around the world. I'm pleased to hear that.

1:19:31Thank you.

1:20:04Rosebud is a Plain Jane production produced by Harriet Jane, hosted by me, Giles Brandreth, with music by Phil Leppard, and recorded this week at the J.W. Marriott Grosvenor House in London's Park Lane. Room service.