11 Days in the White House Then He Built a $3.5B Investment Firm | Anthony Scaramucci - Financier

I took my working-class background, my observation of 38 years on Wall Street, my failed White House communication experience, plus my observations in the media. I sort of welded those together to create that book.

The number one thing, whether you're stressed out as an entrepreneur or you're stressed out at a job, don't play the victim.

There's a voting block in this country. 100 million plus people. They vote the exact same way in every single election. It's the non-voter. Every single election, they don't vote, but they're eligible, but they've checked out.

Well, that's the greatest question that you could have asked me because I think it's a compilation of that. That would have been my pitch to you that I took my working-class background, my observation of 38 years on Wall Street, both at Goldman but also as an entrepreneur, my failed White House communication experience, but my PhD in the way Washington works, having been in political fundraising for 30 years, plus my observations in the media, I sort of welded those together to create that book. So it's a fusion of the political economy, what actually happened on Wall Street that affected Main Street and what are some of the things that we could do better.

I think we have to look at the world the way it is and we have to look at the world from a, you know, not a normative state, meaning I hate the following words: should and ought. So my, I have five kids. My kids say, well, I should have gotten into this school or I ought to have gotten a 36 on the ACT. I'm like, well, that's not how the world works. This is how the world is today. So take my dad as an example. My dad had a great working-class job. If he was doing that same job today, we would have been on the poverty line and he would have probably needed an EBT card. The wages for his job went down 26%. So, we have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way we want it to be or the way it ought to be. So, if you're talking to somebody that's on the job now, what's going right about the job? What's going wrong about the job? Where do they think they're going to be? I have a friend of mine who's in biotech. They have a great couple of drug products in a small niche biotech firm. If they don't get the next round of financing, he's gonna lose his job. He's got anxiety about it. He's done a great job. He's a very professional guy, but he's going to lose his job. So, what I said to him, start looking for a job. I mean, let's not worry about it. Start looking for a job. You then start creating some options. Your best place to look for a job is when you have a job. Start looking for a job. If they get the funding, stop looking for a job. But now, all of a sudden, people know that you're available to them. And by the way, your boss is cool. Your boss knows if the funding doesn't come in, you're not going to be there. You know, I mean, I've had situations where I've had to, I've expanded my firm and unfortunately I have contracted my firm. And these are some of the hardest things to do in the world. And so I was very famously fired from the White House, but I also got fired from Goldman Sachs when I was a young kid. I was 27 years old. They had hired too many people into the real estate department. It was the Gulf War. We had a real estate recession in New York and it was, it was last in first out. I got fired and so I could have taken it very personally and I could have saw myself as a failure but I looked at it like, okay, I got fired. I'm going to be nice to the guy firing me because that person could help me find another job. I'm going to go find another job. And then I've been on the other side of it, Scott, where I've had to tell people, look, I'm sorry the firm is contracting. You know, I let, I don't know, 15 people go during the global financial crisis. During COVID, I had to let some people go. You know, I gave them nice extended pay and I gave them severances and things like that. But, you know, my point is you can't, the number one thing, whether you're stressed out as an entrepreneur or you're stressed out at a job, don't play the victim. Because the worst human emotion that you can have if you want to be successful is self-pity. Because the minute you start thinking badly or woe is me or this is not going my way, it's no good. Okay. Have you heard of the word pronoia? I've used the word before in a few podcasts.

So, P-R-O-N-O-I-A. Pronoia.

Yeah, that's the opposite of paranoia. So, you have to have a belief in your heart that the universe is bending towards you. And the universe is bending towards you for good. And you have to have a belief in your heart that you are going to attract people that want to help you with your life. Okay? So if something bad happens and you are pronoic, you're like, 'Okay, I'm going to slough that off. That's a speed bump on the road to my destination.' You know, I think people make a mistake in thinking that, okay, I'm going to have an arc that goes up at a 45 degree angle and I'm going to have this stress-free life. And maybe you're looking at filtered people on the internet and those filtered people look like that's happening to them. But I guarantee you everybody's living an unfiltered life.

I mean, listen, there's a couple of axiomatic facts. The quicker you understand these axiomatic facts, the better you're going to do in your life. Nobody cares about you, number one. Okay? What other people think of you is none of your business. And by the way, they're not thinking of you. Okay? So, let's go default to number one. Nobody cares about you. Number two, no one is coming to save you. And by the way, your parents, even if they want to save you, and nobody wants you to do better than your parents, it's hard for them to save you. They're in a different generation. They may understand the dilemmas that you're faced on in your career or the economy as you see it versus the economy that they worked in for the 30 years that they were around before you were born or the 35 years, whatever it might be. And so, no one can help you. And the last thing, and this is the most important thing, it's a few things every day that make you special. It's not one big thing. It's a few things every day. So, if you decide, I'm going to take the next hour. I'm going to go through my rolodex and I'm going to call 20 people and I'm going to rebuild that relationship with them or start the relationship. You're now so far ahead of the game than the average person. Average person is showing up. They're doing 9 to 5, 9 to 6, maybe they work a little overtime, but they're thinking about home, thinking about watching a sporting match or relaxing to a podcast. You want to be, you can't be 50% in. You can't be 90% in. You got to be all in. And you got to get that in your head. I'm going to go the extra mile. I'm going to do what it takes to make this podcast a success, my business success, my body success, whatever it might be. You can't be this much in because it's not differentiating enough. You see the point I'm making?

The book, All the Wrong Moves, it's about these decisions that three leaders made that led to Trump. This is what you've been writing about now. But I think that I tried to step back and say to myself, okay, I've been in my adult life started in age 25, 1989. I graduated from Harvard Law School. First job is at Goldman Sachs. It's now 38 years later and I'm sitting around observing my career and I'm observing what happened to the global economy and to the US. What are some of the things that we did wrong? And I submit to you in the book, follow the money in the United States. The country is about money. It was about money in 1776. It was about money in the Civil War. I mean, it was a fight about slavery which was tied to money. Okay? It was about money in the Great Depression. It ultimately became about money after the end of the Second World War. So, you follow the money or as I say in the book, the money point of view of history. I can tell you where things are going. And I'm just simply saying that we got a lot of things right. We were running a budget surplus at the end of 2000. You know, my contemporaries remember it. You may not remember it, but we had a $240 billion budget surplus at the end of 2000 and things were generally going in the right direction. And then wham, we got hit with 9/11. It's 25 years ago. Seems like a long time, but it's a short time. And in that 25 year period of time, we changed the trajectory of the United States. We went from $2.5 trillion of budget deficit to $40 trillion of budget deficit. We took a group of people that were in the lower middle income people that if you interviewed them, Scott, 25, 30 years ago, they felt economically aspirational, like maybe they were going to make it or one of their kids were going to make it. And in that period of time, we made those people economically desperational. So, how did we do that? And so, I believe there are three big catastrophic mistakes that we made. And it's not a partisan book. It's not a polemic or a tribal book. It's an observation. It's an objective observation of decision making by both Republicans and Democrats. By the way, very well intended. You know, good people. There was nothing malevolent about it. But the decisions didn't go the way that these people thought that they would. Number one, we let China into the World Trade Organization. They come in with emerging market status. They're able to sell their goods unfettered to Canada, United States, the West. We accept tariffs and protected markets from them. They do this for 20 years unchecked. It's okay to come in with the same rights as the Dominican Republic when you're a poor country. But when you become larger than the economy of Germany, well then guess what? For the WTO standards, you have to be treated like that. Okay? That caused a crisis in our country. We bled out jobs. We bled out manufacturing. And it changed the landscape of a lot of the flyover states and it hurt the country and it hurt their people's disposable income. The second thing that we did is we went to war after 9/11. We did two wars, one in Afghanistan in '01, one in March of 2003 in Iraq and we cut taxes two times going into those wars. Once in '01, once in '03. It's the only time in our history that we cut taxes going into a major war. We usually raise taxes and so we set this deficit trajectory like this. You want to talk a K-shaped, people are talking about a K-shaped economy. How about a K-shape of revenues and deficit spending? That's what's happened in the United States. And so I explain what we did. I explain the legislation that we broke and the policies that we changed to create this massive deficit spending. It's really hurt the country. Because remember guys, if you take anything from this interview, deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. You're going to pay the price for the deficit spending. And how do we pay it? Well, in our country, we pay it through the most pernicious and the most regressive form of taxation. That's inflation. Because it's a sneaky way to get people, right? And so now you have a dollar, but guess what? Now you only have 70 cents of purchasing power because of what we did. But then what is the person who's reading this book? This has all happened. The situation is what it is. It brings it back to your first point. You can be upset but you can't let that influence how you live your life. Like what does the person do with this information?

Exactly. This left-leaning and right-leaning populism. In my opinion, this is how we caused it. So, let's analyze it and then let's unravel it so that we can make better decisions going forward to fix the political ills and some of the economic ills of the country.

I'll just give you an example. If you open the primary process, some states have open primaries. They usually generate moderate candidates. Remember these campaigns are marketing competitions. Open the primary process, give the independent the right to go into the Democratic primary or into the Republican primary, guess what happens? The people start moderating their views. They want to win. But if you don't have to moderate your views and you're preaching to the extreme end of your party because the primary process is closed, then you're going to get candidates that you and I are like, 'Oh, holding our nose at a candidate.'

And the politicians want that. There's a voting block in this country. 100 million plus people. They vote the exact same way in every single election. Incredibly powerful voting block. It's the non-voter. Every single election, they don't vote. But they're eligible, but they've checked out. They say, 'Ah, it's not going to matter. I'm not going to vote.' But just imagine if you had an entrepreneurial politician that could come into the mix, explain and diagnose the problem, and then convince the non-voter to come into the swimming pool and participate in the process. See, the establishment politician doesn't want that. They have a formula for success. Block third parties, gerrymander their districts to protect themselves, create high incumbency rates on both sides. They want two people playing in the game, each other. They don't want any third parties coming in. And yet the American people have given you a Yelp rating. They said, 'You suck.' Okay, the Congress has a 14% approval rating. It's like slightly above the North Korean dictator. Okay. But yet you got a 96% incumbency re-election rate and it doesn't reconcile itself because they've got the system gamed for themselves and I'm just describing how they did it and I'm suggesting how we can break it.

No, you certainly have to focus on yourself. But let me talk to you for a second. Okay, you live in Florida, but even in Florida, you know, the government is a 40% partner in your life. Okay, I live in New York. I'm a minority partner in my own life. My general partners are Donald Trump, Mayor Adams, and Governor Hochul. Okay, because if a dollar comes into me, I can only get 48 cents. I'm only allowed to keep 48 cents of it. So, I submit to everybody listening to this, even if you are in a lower tax bracket than me, these people are in your life. They're your partners in your life. Good executive leadership matters, Scott. Good executive leadership is a cleaner road. It's a better sanitation system, a better subway. It's easier for the tourists to come in and buy things from your shop. You know, if the trains are running on time and they're clean, the tourists will come in from New Jersey and New York. They'll go to your restaurant. They'll go to a Broadway play. You know, so good executive leadership matters in our society. And so if you check out, you are failing at your responsibility to help the civic side of your life. Listen, you can do it. And it feels like most of us are doing it. And so you want to end up in a barbed-wired McMansion living there in your security-perimetered house while your fellow neighbors are suffering. Yeah, we could do it. Could be heading that way. I don't want that to happen. I want the people around me to do well. I want my neighbors to be like, 'Yeah, Anthony may have more money than me. He may have less money than me, but you know what? My kids are going to have a shot at having a great aspirational life here in America.'

Because it's stupid. It's stupid to get involved in politics. You know, like James Baker had one of the best lines ever. He wrote a memoir. He was the former Secretary of State, Reagan's chief of staff. He's 98 years old. He's a legendary guy. He wrote a memoir about himself and the title of it was 'The Politics of Diplomacy'. And the first chapter was his father telling him not to go into politics. And he explains all the reasons why. It's a nasty business. It's brutish. You can get kicked out of office very quickly. You're on top of the heap one second, you're at the bottom of the heap the next second. And so it's also partisan. It's cost me. It's hurt my business. I'm a politically minded person. I have an opinion. You may not like my opinion. You won't buy from me. Remember Michael Jordan? Michael Jordan was selling sneakers. Still is. But in the 90s working for the Bulls, arguably the best player ever. Well, are you a Democrat or Republican? Take a stand. You say, 'Hey, man, I don't want to take a stand.' The Republicans, you know, they buy sneakers, too. Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton had 20 opportunities to criticize Trump. She never did. 20 opportunities to criticize or praise Joe Biden. She never did. It doesn't make great business sense to do what I'm doing.

Listen, you know, I have my issues with Donald Trump, but I will just say this that on paper, he could have been a great because he was a non-politician. He could have been a post-partisan politician. He could have transcended the tribalism. He could have acted like a business leader. You know, he didn't do that.

Listen, he campaigned on not going to war. He's in Iraq now. I want to talk about decisions because this whole book is about these key decisions that turned the US into what it is today. What are some of the lessons that people can learn from these decisions that were made not maliciously?

I think there's many different lessons but I think we are fallible. We make pride-based decisions, ego-based decisions. We have a little bit of a consensus thought pattern. You know, your coach or your father maybe said or your mom said, you know, you're the weighted average of the five people you hang out with. So, you get the confirmed biases of the people that you hang out with. And so, we developed these consensus ideas. And by the way, what do we want? We don't want to be out of the consensus. I want to get invited to the country club. You know, I want to go to the football game with you. You know, I don't want to tell you something that you don't like. And we do that a lot. And so it's like a lot of group think took place in Washington and they didn't think through some of the ramifications of the decisions. You know, let China in, no problem. You want China to grow, you want to sell goods into their market, no problem. But hey guys, when they're the size of Germany, start treating them like Germany.

No question.

Of course. So, when you do you have because you've operated in both arenas, in politics and as an entrepreneur. I think that most people listening to this podcast have never been involved in politics. And stay out of politics. James Baker was right. Okay, but go ahead. I'm sorry.

You are really a good questioner. So, the mental model for me is a very hard thing to do. It's probably the hardest thing you could do in your life. Get your ego out of things. When I made the decision to go work for Donald Trump, I was not the right person for that job. I also was too combative for Donald Trump. Donald Trump wants somebody to be more pliant, more flattering and you know he doesn't want the bilateral relationship as much as he wants unilateral praise and then him have a unilateral relationship in terms of doing things. It's not bilateral. It's not a business relationship. It's not a give and take. I missed that. I paid dearly for it. But I knew better. So why did I do it? I did it because my ego was logging me. Oh my god, I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. I went to Tufts and Harvard Law School. I worked at Goldman. I built these businesses. Oh, now I'm going to go work for the American president. I'm a big shot. And my wife was telling me, 'You, you know, you're crazy. It's not going to fit. It's not going to work.' 11 days later, I got my ass handed to me. I got shot out of a cannon out of the north portico of the White House and rolled in margarita glass after they skimmed me alive. I mean, I let my pride and I let my ego influence my decision-making. So, the big message in the book is let's take a beat. We may not know everything. We have to seek answers from people that are necessarily smarter than us and get their advice. And oh, by the way, even when we do that, there's some volatility to our decision-making. You could be the best decision maker in the world and still get 30-40% of your decisions wrong. By the way, in money management, if you did that, you're a multi-billionaire.

I think it's okay to be ambitious, but I think you have to check yourself because, you know, there are things I could have done on Wall Street. I could have been a way more ruthless operator on Wall Street than I actually was. Probably would have made me a little bit more money. You know, people could have been richer, but I'm not sure my quality of life would have necessarily been better. You know, I've run into a lot of people who make the extra dollar, but for some reason it wasn't enough. They needed two extra dollars. You know what I mean? And you can create a pattern of misery. So, you got to be really careful. I just, you know, for me, the way I look at things, I say, I went to Wall Street because I had interest in business. I've had a great career on Wall Street. It hasn't been a perfect career. I took exogenous risks. I could have just stayed as a happy camper on Wall Street, not gone to war for Donald Trump. My life would have been totally different.