Hello and welcome to How Do You Cope with me, John Robbins. This is the show where I sit down with special guests to talk about the lives they've led, the challenges they've overcome, and the coping mechanisms they use in their everyday lives. Today's guest is Wall Street financier, broadcaster, and former communications director for President Trump, Anthony Scaramucci.
Anthony has spent much of his professional life in America's finance sector, working for Goldman Sachs and founding multi-billion dollar companies such as Oscar Capital Management and SkyBridge. Having previously supported both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, on the 21st of July 2017, Scaramucci shocked the political world by taking the position of White House communications director for President Trump on July the 31st. As a result of a leaked phone interview where Scaramucci attacked a number of Trump's team, he was dismissed, making his tenure for this role the shortest in White House history. Across this controversial 10-day period, his wife filed for divorce and he missed the birth of his son.
As part of today's episode, I'll be exploring the very public fallout from his sacking, the effects it had on him and his family, and asking him the question he is perhaps best placed to answer: How do you cope with Donald Trump? I'll also be exploring some of the lessons he has learned which he has collected in his book From Wall Street to the White House and Back, including the writings of Viktor Frankl, Marcus Aurelius, and his own grandma. Before we get started, don't forget that you can now watch every new episode of How Do You Cope on YouTube. Just search for How Do You Cope Pod. And you can listen to all episodes wherever you get your podcasts. And whether you're watching or listening, please hit subscribe so you don't miss any future releases. For more info or to get in touch, head to howdoyoucopod.com. Let's get going.
So, welcome to How Do You Cope? And this week my guest is Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony, I think inevitably this conversation is going to become how do you cope with Trump, right? Whether that's as someone who worked with him, a citizen of America, or a citizen of the world. But before we get into that sort of place, I wondered what events in your life away from Trump have got close in terms of the stress or overwhelm that working with him or having him as your president has caused.
Well, I mean, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. Let me step back for a second. I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood as I've often expressed to people. My dad was a tough guy. He was an old school guy, had an immigrant background. He grew up poor. He believed heavily in corporal punishment. Took out a lot of the pain and economic anxiety that he was feeling throughout his life on his family members including me and my brother. So, you have a choice you have to make when you grow up like that. You either hit the override switch. Frankly, one part of you goes into a little bit of denial. You suppress certain things and you say to yourself, I'm getting out of here. I'm going to figure out a way to excel. Excel in school. At that time in America, lots of opportunity. It still is opportunity. It's just different in America today. It's harder for people to grow up with the background that I had to do as well. I can explain that, but that's probably not for this podcast. But for me, I looked at my situation and said, I got to figure out a way around it. So, when I faced off with Donald Trump, a lot of the face off for me was very similar to my upbringing. You know, he's a very dysfunctional guy. He's a very, very damaged guy.
I made so many mistakes going into it. I talked to people about those mistakes before. Again, I'm happy to share them here. But I had him at 69. Again, I'm setting the scene for this is back in 2016. I had him at 69, reasonably successful business person, identifying economic anxiety and economic desperation in the society. And maybe since he wasn't a typical politician, he could do something transformative to fix it. So those were my cognitive biases at the time. There also, you know, you go through cognitive dissonance where you start to equivocate on certain things. So if he was saying rude things about Mexicans, I was equivocating saying, 'Well, that's okay. He's still better than the alternative.' And so you go down that slippery slope and then you're there with him. And then you got two choices. You can act like his cult members and everything he does, you can either ignore or try to explain or defend. Or you can man up, look at the situation and say, 'Okay, wow, this guy is actually an unmitigated disaster. He's going to do way more harm than good in our society.' And so way back in 2019, and look, I got fired in 2017. I tried to stay loyal to the Republican party and I didn't want to be that whiner that got fired and then turned on his quote unquote employer. I didn't want to do that. But by 2019, it became impossible given the things that he was doing. And then you got to say to yourself, okay, am I man enough or do I have enough physical and mental and moral courage to speak out against the person? And so, I don't really think I had a choice actually. You know, I've got five children. I think your children really don't listen to you, John. They watch your actions more than they listen to you. And for me, I said, I got to speak up. I got to state what I think is going wrong. You know, he's trying to intimidate everybody. He's trying to put a lot of pressure on people. And, you know, I've gotten my share of death threats. I've gotten warnings about family members. I mean, all kinds of insidious things have happened. But again, when you say, 'How do you cope?' I mean, I really think you have a choice. I think you have a choice. It's like everything in life. You know, when I was growing up as a kid, I didn't really have a choice. It was one choice. I'm getting the hell out of here. Do the best I can to make something of myself. As it relates to Donald Trump, hey, I don't really have a choice. I have to speak out and at least explain to people what he's doing wrong and hopefully provide some space for people to also feel comfortable speaking out. Somebody like Gavin Newsom as an example would be an example of that. I mean, there's people finally now saying that enough is enough.
Well, let's talk about your inner voice because in your book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back, you say that the most important conversations you ever have in your life are with yourself. And I was really interested by that because for a lot of people that inner voice can be critical, anxious, bitter, resentful. And your inner voice in your sort of two highest profile crisis moments being sacked by Donald Trump and when Sam Bankman-Fried's Bitcoin exchange collapsed and you'd been a big champion of him and encouraged a lot of people to invest and sold some of your company to him. So, you got these two very public moments of I guess embarrassment that your inner voice must have led you to. So, how do you trust... I got two questions, a roundabout way of getting to them. What's your relationship like with your inner voice now? And what advice would you have to people for whom it's a damaging voice?
Well, I think that what's interesting about life is that when you're a high-profile person and you have failure, those high-profile things get blown to pieces exponentially. They go exponential. So, you have to always be careful with your voice because sometimes you have that Dunning-Kruger effect where you think you're better than you actually are and you get overconfident in certain situations. So, you have to be careful about that with your inner voice. Remember if half of us, if there's a median and half of us are below the median, there's very few people, John, that think that they're below the median. You know, everyone thinks that they're above the median. So, you have to be careful with your inner voice and have some self-reflection and you have to have some self-awareness. I think there's no question about that. But I think those two cases that you're bringing up, they're extremely high-profile. And if you just look at those two in isolation, you're like, 'Wow, he's 0 for 2.' But then you miss my inner voice decision to join Goldman Sachs or my inner voice decision in 1996 to start my own company, sell it successfully to Neuberger Berman in 2001, which led to a series of phenomenal business relationships for me which have made me and my family very financially successful. Or some of the inner voice decisions I made to start SkyBridge or to build SkyBridge or to move some of the assets into Bitcoin when Bitcoin was at 20,000, it's now at closer to 90,000. And so if you take the totality of decisions, I'm pretty happy with my inner voice. Yes. Have I made mistakes? Certainly. Have some of my mistakes been very high-profile? Certainly. But I'm not going to doubt my inner voice because I've made a few mistakes. If anything, when you make a mistake, how do you handle it? You know, in Trump's case, I got in there. I was fighting with the president. I got summarily fired because of that fight. I didn't want to do certain things he wanted me to do. He's now found people that are willing to do those things in a second term. You know, I took an oath to the Constitution. I just didn't want to do certain things that he was suggesting. Got me fired. With the Sam Bankman-Fried situation, you know, there were 25 venture capitalists that gave Sam money. The good news for me is yes, I was encouraging people to give him money, but it was only after I allowed him to make an investment in my firm. And the consequences of that story were nobody that I recommended him to gave him any money because this is the... and again it doesn't reflect well on me but these are the facts. I after consulting with 25 sovereign wealth funds and venture capitalists who had given Sam money, done my due diligence, I allowed him to buy a piece of my company. That was in September of 2022. I then made an outreach on his behalf starting sometime in October. By November the fraud was uncovered. So nobody that I had recommended him to actually gave him any money. But now you've got this fraud, the Department of Justice. I mean talk about coping. One of the worst days for me in my business career was the revelation of Sam's fraud. But maybe a close second was having to visit with the Department of Justice, the IRS, the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission where I spent four and a half hours with them in August of 2023 talking about the situation. And I had turned over all of my documents. I turned over my email traffic, my WhatsApp, my Signal, all of that stuff to the authorities. And what I tell younger people, we talk about inner voice, have integrity. You know, if you have integrity and you don't do anything wrong, there'll always be opportunity for you. So, you know, entrepreneurs, probably different in the United Kingdom, perhaps in Europe, but in the United States, if you're an entrepreneur, there's a general expectation that you're going to have some pretty big failures. You're going to have some pretty big setbacks because that's the nature of taking risks. And then the real question is how do you handle yourself after those setbacks or during those setbacks?
So with your... in those moments, in those sort of crisis moments, those worst days, you know, when you look back on your career, what is it that you're saying to yourself? Because those sorts of situations are why some people either give up, quit, move away or sometimes may even take their own lives to avoid the embarrassment. And like you say, you've got, you know, on your personal tally of wins and losses or successes and failures, the successes far outweigh the failures. But I think everyone's greatest fear at the minute is the public nature of shaming or of making mistakes or being sort of exposed somehow. So what were you sort of saying to yourself in those moments?
Well, you know, listen, you got to make a decision. And this is probably the hardest thing for human beings because we're by nature social organisms. When you're 15 years old, you care about what other people think about you. When you get to be 60 years old, which I'm now 62, you realize that nobody cares about you. Nobody's thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves. And so you'd be better served the earliest possible time in your life not to care what other people think about you. Or you know, maybe something my grandmother used to say is very hard to do but what other people think about you is none of your business. And so for me, I've never really been overly bothered. I think as evidenced by my life. I don't really care what other people think about me. You know, when I got fired from the White House, if you read the press clippings, if you listen to the cable news punditry or the cable news comedians or late night comedians, I guess I should have crawled into a hole somewhere. You know, I tell this story. It's sort of funny today, but eight years ago, I met with a crisis PR person that told me, you know, this is a disaster. You'll never recover from this. So, you know, you're a rich guy. Why don't you buy a villa in Tuscany, move to Italy for 5 years, then you come back to the United States sometime in 2022? And I laughed out loud. I'm like, I'm not doing that. That's not my personality. Number one. Number two, I'm fully capable and willing to face the music. And number three, again, what these people think of me, I don't really care. I got to go make my life's way. You know, you talk about suicide, that's a big thing. I'm a Roman Catholic and so I don't have that on the table ever. You know, God forbid. I hope I can say that as I get older and perhaps more frail. I think that there's a natural course of life and I would like to live the whole thing, the trials and tribulations of all of it. So, you know, I don't think there's anything that's going to happen to me that's going to cause me to commit suicide. Knock on wood. And I'll tap wood because who the hell knows? But I would say for people that have bad things happen to them, get over it. You know, dust yourself off. You know, start tomorrow. Tomorrow's a good day.
I went and faced the music. I went, every one of those shows that made fun of me, I went on the show, whether it was Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, I didn't care. I faced the music. And what happens when you go into politics, and this may happen for some of your podcast listeners, and so they should pay attention to this, you can get too dimensionalized by your adversaries, they can turn you into a caricature. And that's an effective strategy because if they want to silence your voice, the best way to silence your voice is through an ad hominem attack. They attack you personally or attack your reputation and that will demean your intellectual voice. And so the important thing to do when that's happening is to blow yourself back up again into the three dimensions. You know, go on a podcast like yours, John, or visit with people, meet with people, get your voice back out there. And you know, I always laugh. People say, 'Oh, geez, you're way smarter than I thought.' And I laugh. Well, I did go to Harvard Law School. I didn't... there was no legacy. You know, my father was a crane operator. There's no Scaramucci law library at the Harvard Law School. I had to have gotten in there due to some measure of merit, but you know, not offended by that. I get it. I get that that's the way human nature works and life works and social media and things like that. And I think it's very important for people to, you know, do their best not to care. The less you care about things like that, the more productive, more successful you're going to be.
You mentioned earlier a way of dealing with your childhood was to excel, to find a way to get out, to become your own man, to become financially stable. And I know that you have mentioned that your brother struggled with addiction and that's another way people can go. They try to block it out, numb it, soothe themselves. And when we hear about addiction, we often hear from the addict in recovery. We rarely hear from the addict in addiction and we rarely hear from the families. So without asking you to speak to his story, what was your experience of having addiction in the family, especially with someone so close when you had taken the path to kind of break free from that world?
Well, yeah, but you get your own different addictions, you know. You become addicted to work and workaholism. You have other peccadillos. I don't think you ever fully escape heavy dysfunction. You may channel it differently, you may channel it in ways that look more beneficial to yourself and the society, but you know, I probably developed as a result of my upbringing some levels of workaholism, which is another form of addiction. But my brother... in my brother's story, about 10 years ago, we did a podcast together which has now been shared to over I think a million people where he talks about our upbringing and he talks about his struggles with addiction. And you know, I've always encouraged people to look that up. They could just, you know, Google it. They could find me and David talking for 45 minutes about that. And I was in an airport once on the security line and somebody tapped me on the shoulder said, 'Hey, listen. I'm 10 years sober and if I ever miss one of my AA meetings, I listen to the podcast of you and your brother. It's very therapeutic for me.' And that gives me some level of joy and gives me some level of hope for people. So number one, you know, addicts to me, it's a disease. You know, certainly there are behavioral patterns, but if you're overly stigmatizing addicts, you're getting into a really bad zip code. You know, there's a disease associated with it. Some people can take a drug one or two times, put it down. Another person could take the drug one time and never get over it and be addicted to it forever. And so I would say to you that his addiction and his recovery have been both painful and hopeful to me simultaneously. You know, and by the way, I might add this that he's not the only person in my family that has experienced that. You know, I have alcoholics and other drug addicts in my family besides my brother David. He's just been the one willing to speak about it. Which is one of the reasons why, you know, if you and I meet up, you'll see that I'm not really a drinker. Not that I've ever had a drinking problem. I just knew if there's genetic dispositions towards these things, I'm going to avoid them to keep myself out of harm's way. And so, but yeah, no, it's tough. You know, you know this and people listening to you know this because you got probably one of the best titles in podcast history. How do you cope? I mean, we're all coping with something. When you grow up like that, there's anxiety. And when you grow up with that level of anxiety, you have to make a conscious decision which way you're going to go because if you downward shift and replicate some of the things that you came from, it can be really bad for you. But you know what the flip side is? If you try to do the opposite, it could also be very bad for you. You know, my father was conflict-intensive, believed heavily in corporal punishment. John, I became conflict-avoidant. And I think that hurt my relationships and hurt my business career in the beginning. And so I did need some therapy and I did need some self-awareness training to get myself into the middle. Because if you're doing it on your own, you may overshoot in a different direction. So it's just something for people to think about. I think it's okay to get help. It's okay to raise your hand. There's no shame in saying to somebody, 'Hey, this is what went on in my background. How do you think it's impacting my personality? How do you think I can make myself better? How can I improve myself?'
I want to talk about ego because the way you discuss it in your book is really interesting. You come at it from lots of different angles. And I think something that's really important in getting to some kind of inner peace and that can be inner peace that you find while still in a very stressful environment doesn't necessarily mean going and sitting on a hill somewhere for the rest of your life, but is a kind of ego death. And in my experience of addiction recovery, a big part of that is an ego death. I've always thought of the 12 steps as kind of like a guided ego death. And you speak very openly about those public moments when you were sort of, you know, the talk show hosts were making fun of you. The comedians were making fun of you. They were doing cartoons of you. And that was a kind of ego death because you've acknowledged that your ego led you into the situation with Trump. So I wonder if you could speak about your experience of your ego and I don't necessarily mean that in a sort of... I don't mean ego in the sense of just being sort of puffed up and full of yourself. I mean just sense of who you are.
Oh, I think I'm getting what you mean. You mean ego in terms of identity and the Freudian definition of ego and how we think about ego. I guess what I would say, these are great questions by the way. I guess what I would say is that you need some level of ego and you need some level of healthy ego which is inspiring and creates some self-confidence and some can-doism about your personality. But you have to be very careful with your ego because if it gets overly inflated then you border into arrogance and then arrogance borders into hubris and then once you're in the area of hubris, tragic things can start happening to you like the Greeks explained. And so I don't want to say that I have had a complete ego death because I don't think I have had a complete ego death. Maybe that's the best thing you can do. Maybe that's how you get to Nirvana is to have a complete ego death. I think I'm too human and I'm not sublime enough to have had a complete ego death. But I do think that part of ego death is recognizing your own insignificance. And just bear with me for a second. People ask me about my legacy. I'm like I don't really have a legacy and I don't really care. No one's going to remember us thousands of years from today. No one's going to remember us. We remember King Tut because in 1921, an explorer opened up his cave. But the other pharaohs and things like that, no one has any idea what happened in ancient Egypt or, you know, 50,000 years ago, there were people painting caves. We don't know who they were. And maybe people will remember Neil Armstrong because he set foot on the moon, but that's it. And so for me, I think you got to give up on your level of significance. So that's a part of an ego death. And when you do that, you get very comfortable. You know, you talk about appreciating things. Just the fact that I'm sitting here talking to you and I've had a nice cup of coffee today and I'm in a warm house after 24 inches of snow poured on us yesterday. Couldn't be more grateful for that. And so for me, where I got ahead of myself, I think this is important to understand, and this has to do with perhaps my upbringing. I was bringing a self-narrative into the game. What was my self-narrative? Well, I'm a self-starter. I've lived a good part of the American dream. I went to Tufts and Harvard. I built some successful companies. Oh, and now I got a chance to work for the American president. If my ego was in check, I would have said, 'No, I can't work for that president because our personalities are not in sync and our morals are not exactly in sync and this will end badly for me.' And I tell this story to people, John, I don't think I've ever shared it publicly like on a podcast, but I have a sort of a mentor. He's 10 years older than me. Brilliant guy. He's gone on to making tremendous amounts of money. And he had asked me to help him get a position in the government. And I said, 'No problem. It would be my honor to do that.' I went to Trump and I got him interviewed and he was appointed to this position. But prior to the inauguration, he pulled himself out of the position. I don't want to bring up his name because that wouldn't be fair to him, but he called me and said, you know, I spent enough time with Donald Trump now. I spent six hours with him. Doesn't have the right personality for me. I'm going to pull myself out of this thing. I think it'll end badly for me. Had his ego in the right place. He was really self-aware and really had a good idea of what was happening. I didn't. I talked myself into it. I did the cognitive dissonance. My wife tried to tell me and my wife probably hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. And that's like Eastern European hatred and it's like generational hatred, her hatred for him. But my wife tried to tell me not to do it. I didn't listen to her because I wanted it to fit my self-identity. You know, here I was a blue collar kid, Tufts and Harvard, two successful hedge fund businesses, worked at Goldman Sachs. Now I can go work for the American president and fly around on Air Force One. So you see I was trying to fit that into my narrative. That's ego. That's egocentrism. That's pride. And as the ancient Greeks would tell you, your ego and your pride are ultimately your enemy. You got to be very careful. You got to be more self-aware than that. But flip side of it is because I do think there's silver linings in most things as long as it's not health related. Trump ironically gave me a platform due to the notoriety of my firing and due to the infamy of my firing. He ironically gave me a platform where I could articulate and speak out against what he's doing and the harm that he's creating in our society both here in the United States but also the global society. So there's a silver lining in what happened.
I think that's such a good way of moderating oneself because I've had those moments where you start to see your life as a film and you're the star and you begin to write the sort of the third act and whether that's, you know, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, I'm walking into the White House, this is the big sort of denouement, or whether, you know, I'm John Robbins, I've written this comedy show and I'm about to step out on stage, whatever it is, you've sort of stepped out beyond your line in the sand really and it's a bit that reminds me of that old phrase, you know, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.
