So, hi everyone. I'm John D'Agostino. Your name again? Sorry.
Scaramucci. Okay. So another quick poll.
I'm his older but also shorter brother. Unfortunately, he got the height in the family. All right. But go ahead.
So, another quick poll. I'm going to split this into two parts. One is very light and fun. The other's a little more serious. Who thinks we should do the light, fun part first and end serious? Who thinks we should flip it and start with serious?
I think everybody just wants fun and fun.
No, we got a little bit serious. A little bit North Fork of Long Island.
Quick, come on. Who wants to start with fun?
Start with fun. Okay, we're going to start with fun. Okay.
So, here's what we're going to do. We're going to play a game, right? Because you and I have done so many of these.
I tried to do something a little bit different. So, now there's a very common game many of you have probably played. We can't really say the name in this audience, but you take three things and you rank them: marry, blank, kill. Right? We all know what I'm talking about.
Now, we can't do that today. We can't say those words. So, we're going to do marry, kiss, fire in 11 days.
All right. You ready? Okay. We'll start light. We're going to start light, nice and easy.
We both grew up in Brooklyn, Italian mothers: wooden spoon, belt, hand. Marry, kiss, fire in 11 days.
So the belt was very bad. When you were getting hit with the belt, it was usually from a male in the family, so that one I want to kill.
I'm going to kiss the wooden spoon. That was always my nana. And so she would come at you with the spoon, but she would never hurt you. What was the third one?
Hand, belt, wooden spoon.
Yeah. So the hand was the hand. Okay. The first thing my mother did with the hand was like this: she bit the hand and then she came at you with the hand. It was bad. She was a lefty, and great left hook from my mother.
Excellent. Keep it light now.
World Cup, World Series, Super Bowl.
I mean, listen, I would kill the World Series comparatively. I think it's very boring compared to those other two.
Okay. I would kiss the World Cup because I still don't get how they don't score for 90 minutes and it's an exciting game. I haven't figured that out. Having said that, it is an exciting game, and I'm a big Super Bowl fan. So, I guess I'm—what am I doing with that one? I'm marrying that.
You're marrying Super Bowl. All right. Now, we're going to shift into the focus of this conversation, which is resiliency. Now, the reason you and I were chosen—
Because we failed upward, you and me, pretty much. Right. So we get our asses kicked every three months, and then—the great thing about you and me, when shit goes bad, the papers write about us. You can't fail in private. You have to fail very publicly in the New York Post.
So, in 2004, I was on the cover of the Wall Street Journal for being the youngest VP in NYMEX history. In 2006, I was on the cover again for being part of the third largest hedge fund blow-up in US history, all in about 18 months.
You had some stuff happen to you as well.
Yeah. One thing that I've always admired about you is your ability to navigate the media in the face of all this. We're going to get into it in a second, but—
There's no navigation. There's no navigating the media.
Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn—
Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn.
So, LinkedIn, I don't even know what it is, to be honest. I mean, so that one I'm going to kill. All right. I'm going to marry YouTube because YouTube is bigger than everything. Really study YouTube. It's bigger than Netflix. It's bigger than Warner Bros. Discovery plus Paramount. YouTube is the colossus. And by the way, every single person here could be a YouTube entrepreneur if they have the right content. Okay. What was the third one?
Twitter, X. You know, a little bit of a cesspool, but I like it because it's very grungy. So, I mean, we can't fuck that. Right. We have to kiss. Okay, we have to marry.
All right. Thank you. Okay. All right. So let's pause the game there for a second because I want to dive into this. One of the things—
This is fun, right? I got more. I got more.
All right. Keep going. One of the things that struck me when all that was happening with you is the manner in which you navigated social media. Now, crypto at large is going through a state of depression. I think apathy versus negativity.
A lot of people I've spoken to in this audience are struggling with how they—
The worst thing, by the way, because you want your ex to quietly hate you. When your ex becomes apathetic, you know you're pissed off about that, right? And that's why you do certain things on social media to egg people on. But the worst thing is apathy. But go ahead.
So, what advice do you have, starting at the 10,000-foot level? What advice do you have for folks who are tasked with messaging out, whether it's their company, the macro environment, whatever it is—salespeople or spokespeople—for navigating an apathetic-to-negative social media environment and media environment?
So, there's really only two things you can do: you can build or buy. Those are the two things you can do. You can message into a vortex. You can message into an echo chamber if that makes you feel good. You can do that. But really, the only two things to do are build or buy.
And so you and I were talking about an asset that's down a lot, that's in disarray, looks very cheap. Maybe you and I team up and buy it and we merge a few things together. Or you just keep your head down and you build. I've been destroyed a few times, but the worst one crypto-related was with Sam, because I really liked Sam and I trusted Sam and I let him buy 30% of our business. And so when he imploded, I was like the poster boy for that. I went from announcing on CNBC that he was buying a piece of my business—we were like heroes. Eight weeks later, we went from hero to zero. I had to announce on CNBC that he had committed fraud and I got caught up in it. And so there was only one thing to do: face the music with the media, but then dig in and start building. And so that's what we did.
And by the way, this is a shallow bear market in my mind compared to that. There's apathy and people feel bad, but I think Bitcoin's at like 65,000 or 66,000 right now. It's not at 15,000. That's where the real pain was.
What was a tougher time for you? Was it the Trump thing or was it the Sam thing?
If you're ever having a bad day, the Trump thing was the fucking worst fucking thing that you could ever imagine. Okay, so I got fired after 11 days. But let me just set the scene for you. My wife and I were fighting.
She filed for divorce because she's also Italian. So she was in the kill mode; she wasn't in the F mode or the marry mode anymore. And so she was filing for divorce. I missed the birth of my son. People don't remember that, but I remember it. He was born on July 24th. He's going to be nine—we just had his birthday party last week, last Saturday. He was born on July 24th, 2017. You can look it up on your Google Calendar. That was a Monday. Where was I? I was at the Boy Scouts event in West Virginia where Trump was saying, I don't know, sexual innuendo to the Boy Scouts. It was another bizarre form of behavior. But Deidre was due on August 11th. She gave birth on July 24th. There was a 60-mile no-fly zone around Air Force One. There was no way to get back to New York.
So, I got a divorce filing, missed the birth of my son, and I got fired by the White House and lit up by the social media cable news pundits. I think Bill Maher called me a Jersey Shore cast member. Jimmy Kimmel called me Tony Soprano on the PTO. It was brutal. And then Saturday Night Live called me human cocaine.
I thought that was fucking great. Okay. But it was brutal. So, I had to survive all that, repair my marriage, and thankfully we just celebrated James's birthday and we're still married, thank God.
Knock on wood, thank God. Thank you. And I appreciate that because let me tell you, that was very rough. And if you want to talk about blame, people say, "Oh, 50% blame one way or the other." 99-to-1 on that one; I would have to take the blame. And the good news about her, she's a forgiving person. Thank God she loved me. Otherwise, we wouldn't be married.
But I'm just going to tell you something. It's not crypto-related, but maybe it is: don't make your relationships disposable. Because this is what we do in life. We dispose of everything. Somebody does one thing wrong, we're going to throw them in the garbage. If you love somebody, you're going to go through human things. Work it out. That's the message there.
I didn't realize this was going to be a therapy session.
You're cheaper than my therapist, D'Ag. But let me say one thing. If you're having a bad day, call me, okay? Because if it's not cancer, I can tell you about my day on the 31st of July in 2017. I'll cheer you up. Okay. Go ahead. Keep going, John.
When you think back to those days, what was the first thing you remember doing to start digging yourself out?
I went to go visit my son in the hospital.
And then I was trying to figure out a way to get back in good graces with Deidre. That was the first two things.
You prioritized. Number one is your family. Number two—
But here's the thing. He's passed now and may his soul rest—he was a phenomenal guy, we became very close friends—somebody told me to hire a crisis PR person. And so I did. I hired a crisis PR person. I sat down with the guy, and he helped Michael Douglas with something, and this person and that person. And he's like, "Okay, listen. This is terrible. You are destroyed. And so here's what you should do. You're a pretty wealthy guy. You should buy a villa in Tuscany and you should disappear from the United States for five years. Come back in 2022, and then we'll talk about potentially rebuilding your relationships."
And I looked at Howard—his name was Howard Bragman. You can look him up. He was a phenomenal guy. I loved Howard. I actually went to Israel with him and said Kaddish at Rebecca's Tomb for his mother. Him and I became very, very close friends. I said, "Howard, that's the stupidest advice that I've ever heard." I said, "I hired you for your Rolodex. Give me Jimmy Kimmel's number." And I read mean tweets on Kimmel, which was absolutely brutal. And then I went on Colbert and then I went on Bill Maher and I faced the music. And if you're in a situation like that, face the music.
My friend Billy Bush—anybody remember Billy Bush? He did not face the music. This guy really got hit in the Trump crosshairs. He was on the bus with Trump when Trump was grabbing him by the you-know-what. He didn't really do anything wrong; he was just listening to him. That happened in '05. He was getting excoriated in '16, and it took him four or five years to dig himself out of that hole. So you can go Billy Bush or the way I did it: you've got to face the music.
I want to make sure we leave the audience with an actionable series of advice, so I want to just summarize. First and foremost: prioritize, right? Just like if you're lost in the woods, the most important thing is water, then food, then shelter, right? Personal, family relationships—take care of that first. Get yourself in a good mental state, then own it. Now, in all fairness, not everyone can do that. It takes character and personality.
How about being honest with yourself? I was with one of my kids yesterday, and he had a bad moment in high school, and the way he remembered it was literally not how it happened, okay? Because I remember it totally differently and I sort of remember the school's version of what happened. And so, how about being honest with yourself?
Before you can prioritize, you have to be honest with yourself and you have to look in the mirror and say, "What am I doing wrong?" Because the hardest thing for every person, in my opinion, is when you're doing things wrong, you have a tendency to smooth them over or to alibi yourself. You can't do that in a relationship or in business. Listen, I made a mistake teaming up with Sam. What am I going to do? Be the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz and try to pretend that that wasn't my fault? I made the decision. I have to own the decision. So, even before you prioritize, you've got to look in the mirror and say, "Okay, what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong?"
Everybody here probably knows who Tony Robbins is, right?
