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Now, in the opening of his new book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, Anthony Scaramucci takes us back to 1999. He's 35 years old, working on Wall Street in Manhattan, watching the WTO protests unfold in Seattle, and by his own telling, not yet seeing the full picture or the consequences that would follow. At almost exactly the same time, I was a 19-year-old hick from Wyoming on the ground in Seattle. In my backpack, I had a can of bear spray, some granola bars, a bottle of water, and an old Canon shot camera. I got teargassed. I watched the protests turn into riots. And I didn't have a full picture either. 27 years later, somehow our paths crossed in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium. This time we sat down together to talk about the future, Wyoming, economic diversification, blockchain, the Wyoming stable token, and what new technologies might mean for people living out here on the frontier. Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital, founder and chairman of Salt, former White House communications director, and bestselling author. This is Beyond the Range. If you dig what we're into, like the episode, subscribe to the channel, and check out the BTR Dispatch at the QR code on your screen. Love you all. [__] it. Let's go.
So, Anthony, you have 20 minutes to change the future of Wyoming. No pressure.
20 minutes. Yeah.
Are you ready? Go. Who are you?
It's so interesting because when I was a kid, the news in New York in 22 minutes will give you the world. That was their tagline. So, in 20 minutes, how would I change Wyoming? But I'll just briefly say who I am. I'm a product of Long Island, New York. I grew up in Port Washington. Went to a public school. Then I went to a small college in Boston called Tufts. Then I went to Harvard Law School. When I came out of Harvard, I worked at Goldman. I left Goldman after 7 years. I built an asset management company that I sold. And then a few years after I sold that company, I started Skybridge and Salt, which is why we're here. We're doing our conference here for the third year at the Four Seasons here in Jackson Hole. But I have been coming to Wyoming since 2000. As I mentioned to you, I've been to Cody, and visited one of the more beautiful ranches in the state and had an opportunity to survey your hometown, which I thought was magnificent. And I selected Wyoming for the conference because of the forward thinking on the blockchain, forward thinking on digital assets, some of the ideas in the state about libertarianism, frankly, which is a hallmark of Bitcoin and a hallmark of blockchain.
And I think you live in what could be the most beautiful place in the world. Every time I come here, and I said this to my wife two days ago when we landed at your airport here in Jackson, I said, 'Wow, I remember the place being beautiful, but it's a year later. I don't remember it being this beautiful.' Okay. So, a real tribute to you guys in terms of the wonder and glory of the natural environment that you're living in. And so, I think we're very blessed to be here. But I think if I were going to change the state, one of the things I would probably want to do is develop more work-from-home activity. I would want to encourage—again, your governor's done a great job and your prior governors have also done a great job—because the state is pristine and beautiful, but if you want to keep people in the state, we're in a mobile environment now. Now, we've got this wonderful technology where if you and I were doing this interview 15 or 20 years ago, there'd be huge cameras and 15 people in the room and lights everywhere, and we've slimmed things up from a technology perspective. And I would be thinking about, okay, how can I create a vibrant work-from-home call center environment or work-from-home strategic environment where people would be like, wow, I've got an amazing opportunity globally. I can be still here in this pristine place.
Yeah. So land of high altitudes, low multitudes, remote work maybe is one of the opportunities that you are sort of seeing here.
I think so. And I think that's built off of the back of like you mentioned, previous governors, me, Gordon, some of their endeavors to diversify economically, which usually I think really started at like the fundamental infrastructure layer. Like we have good fiber optic, like we've got good transmission, pretty good on power, all of this stuff. So we've got the basics, the first principles to support something like, you know, contention of like remote work stuff, whatever that means, right? The new, not necessarily gig economy, but just integrated digital information economy, whatever that means.
You said something that I didn't know. You said that two-thirds of the people above the age of 30 leave the state and they happen to leave the state permanently.
Two-thirds of kids, yeah, in the last 30 years born in Wyoming, yeah, leave the state permanently by the age of 30.
By the age of 30. Okay. So, to me, you know, that's troubling to me because, you know, that means they think that there's more economic opportunity elsewhere. And so, but the flip side of that is you don't want to break what you have here. This is a super special place, too. So, you want to be very careful. This is a—I don't know—this is a national monument in some ways. You're adjacent to the national parks. You're swathed with national parks. And so you've got to balance those two things. You know, you put a couple big airfields in here and start changing the state, and you know, I think you're going to ruin sort of the chemistry of what makes you guys so special. But, you know, this is the thing about public service. I could tell people I had an ill-fated career in Washington. I got fired by President Trump after 11 days. But I'm going to tell you something I learned in those 11 days that people should really—and it's humbling, by the way, humbling to get fired. But what is really humbling is the decision-making that goes on at the governmental level because you look at the situation. Let's take the White House for a second. You get something to come into the White House. Well, there's 5,000 people in the executive branch. There's maybe 200 in the White House. If the decision is going to get made in the White House, that means that there were several thousand people that could not make that decision. And so, usually when the president of the United States is making a decision, it's super difficult. Otherwise, somebody in government, Marco, would have made the decision. And so, I would ask people that listen to your podcast: we have a tendency because of our free speech and, you know, we throw eggs and tomatoes at our public servants at times and we double and triple guess them and things like that. I'm not saying we shouldn't do that. We should always certainly do that. But these are hard decisions because there are trade-offs. You know, if the government makes a big capital investment to try to retain people, you just want to make sure you're balancing that with the environmental interest and you're balancing that with other things that are going on in the state.
Yeah. The balance thing. And that's what I'm getting out of this economic diversification thing is, you know, for many years, you know, our bread and butter is mineral extraction, right? Like Wyoming has this identity crisis. Like on paper, we're the equality state, right? Like first, you know, women's suffrage. We're branding ourselves as the cowboy state, but when it comes to our balance sheet and, you know, revenues coming in, we're the mineral state. And that economic diversification is, you know, a wrapper for this idea of balance preserving, like you said, which I think is really cool that you say this, you know, not living in Wyoming, like, you know, no offense or anything, but like that is a prevailing theme in Wyoming, is how do we balance this like wide open spaces, not a ton of people, how do we not love this place to death, but how do we address this? I call it the 70% dilemma. Those kids, you know, leaving for lack of opportunity. So, I dig it. And I really dig like, you know, and it opens my eyes like, okay, so as an executive, like the president or something, I didn't realize there's 5,000 people in the executive branch, of which 200 filter through the White House, which means—and I'm just reiterating here—that principle, the president, whoever that is, is making a tough decision because otherwise one of those 200 people would have made that.
Or the 5,000 people that are in the branch of government. When it filters to the top, there are very difficult decisions. The other thing that happens—it's not like Hollywood. So if you read the presidential daily brief, as an example, you'll find that there are percentages in the briefs. There's no absolutism.
So we have a 50% chance that bin Laden is in the house in Abbottabad, or maybe it was 60% once they did more clarification, but they didn't say it was 100%. You know, if you remember in 2003, leading up to the Gulf War, the CIA director said it was a slam dunk that they had weapons of mass destruction in the country. They didn't have them. Couldn't find them anywhere. And you know, the guys at the UN that used to do the advisory and inspection work in Iraq said that they weren't there. And so, you know, so we're very, very cautious. I'm just saying if you're the governor of this state, there's like five—talk about first principles. What would be on my list if I were the governor of the state? It would be a huge privilege and an honor, but if I was, I would be like, okay, how do I preserve this state, the natural habitat of this state, and the people that are living in this state are direct beneficiaries of that. You know, when you think about life—and I guess I must be getting older—but there's a pie chart to your wealth, and a lot of your wealth, frankly, is not going to come from money or even your career. It's going to come from the psychic experience and the physical experience of your environment. And so I think that has to be weighed when you're making economic development decisions, you know.
Especially in this era of climate change.
I wish I could take you to Long Island where I grew up, and I wish I could take you to Long Island in the 1960s and the 70s where people were complaining about the overdevelopment of Long Island. But you fast forward, you know, 40 to 60 years, the place is very different and it's more urbanized now. And there's a sadness that comes with that for somebody like me that grew up in a little bit more spacious place than we have today.
Yeah. Yeah. Nah, never mind. I was going to talk about a terrace psychologist, this guy I know that talks just all about this kind of stuff, but I agree. And, you know, like just for where we're at right now, the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, right? This is one of the last great intact ecosystems in temperate latitudes on the planet.
And I think so that gives you responsibility, right? And how do we value that? You know what I mean? Like, and beyond like when you're talking about like wealth or something, like wealth is capital is capital. Money is money. Like wealth is life. Like wealth is abundance.
Well, wealth is health. Wealth is love. Wealth is your surroundings. Wealth is the connectivity that you have to your loved ones, but also your community. All of that stuff is super important. You know, I find people that are myopically focused on money—they may end up with the money, but they get a whole baggage of unhappiness that comes with it. That's not me being a sour grape person. It's just me making an observation. You know, there's a great book that Douglas Brinkley, a very famous historian, wrote about Teddy Roosevelt, okay? And it was really addressing places like Montana and Wyoming. And when Roosevelt got himself out to this area of the world, what he thought about it includes the Dakotas as well. And his whole thing—because remember, he was a New Yorker. He grew up in Manhattan in a very rich family. And he came out here, he looked at this place, he said, 'Oh my god, how do we preserve this?' You know, this is America. This is part of the heart and soul of America. So when I think of the country—and I have an undying, unconditional love affair with this country—when I think of the country, I think of the charm and the graciousness of states like Wyoming or Midwestern graciousness. I think of the, you know, listen, Superman may have moved to Metropolis, but he grew up in Kansas, you know, I mean, the rocket landed in Kansas.
Because why? Because this is American values. Okay. I have not—again, I've been coming to the state for 26 years. The charm of the state, the graciousness of the people, the kindness that you feel in the state—it's connected. It's connected to the ecology. It's connected to the ecosystem that you're living in.
So, let's transition. I'm trying to find a good transition.
You don't have to. Let's be abrupt. You know what I mean?
Pretend you're New York. Channel your New Yorkerism. Okay. Let's be abrupt.
All right. Then give me that hard transition.
