Anthony Scaramucci is the former communications director to the White House, and at one point, he ran a company with $10 billion in assets under management. He grew up in a blue-collar family in the Bronx in Harlem. He went to Harvard Law School, but didn t get into the Ivy League program. Instead, he went to a motorcycle shop.
00:00:00.00030 seconds, one time for the underdog, ignition sequence start, let me see you put em up, reach the sky, turn the stars up above, cause it's one time for the underdog, one time for the underdog.
00:00:17.280I'm Patrick Bedevi, host of Entertainment, and today I sat down with Anthony Scaramucci, a.k.a. The Mooch.
00:00:23.140This is the communications director to the White House at one point for Donald Trump, and also at the same time, he ran a company with $10 billion under management, he still does.
00:00:32.060A pretty well-connected guy in New York, the conversation went all over the place, but something tells me you're going to get a complete different angle about himself and Trump by the time you're done listening to this podcast.
00:00:40.800Thanks for being a guest on Entertainment.
00:00:42.140You got a good role going on, Patrick.
00:00:45.680You got a good role, yeah. You got a good vibe, you got a good aura, a great suit.
00:00:49.620I appreciate it. I can say the same thing about you.
00:00:51.440There's a lot of stuff going on here. So what's cooking?
00:00:53.480You got a lot of interesting things about yourself. Your background, you know, you've hung out with some big personalities.
00:00:58.560Obviously, I know who you are, but when I was going deeper, I said, this guy went to Harvard at the same time Obama went to Harvard, and you guys played basketball together.
00:01:14.020You know, look, you got to get born in the United States, and you—providence gives you a good brain if you're a hard worker.
00:01:21.440I hustled my way into Harvard Law School.
00:01:23.640So a lot of good things came out of that, right?
00:01:25.380I got at the Goldman, and then I started my own business, and then I started the process of networking with a lot of people.
00:01:31.460You know, I mean, I grew up in a blue-collar family with a tight budget.
00:01:35.960You know, it was a middle-class family, so we didn't really have any connections in any country clubs or alumni networks or boarding schools or things like that.
00:01:43.580So, I mean, we had to make it ourselves.
00:02:54.840Really the first entrepreneur in my family.
00:02:57.520I used to tell my uncle that, you know, I'm proudest of being the only person in Ghost Motorcycles employment history to go to the Harvard Law School.
00:03:14.140Yeah, so when I called her, I got into Harvard Law School, February 6, 1986, which was Reagan's 75th birthday for those people following trivia at home.
00:03:23.060I called my mother, landline phone, obviously.
00:03:41.000There were no books in the house growing up.
00:03:42.940That's pretty amazing for you to go to.
00:03:44.140Now, you went to get your J.D. and be a lawyer, and then you decided to go finance.
00:03:48.400So how did that transition take place for you to say, I'm going a different direction?
00:03:51.320I want to totally express to your viewers the level of naivete and my lack of global understanding, my lack of awareness.
00:03:59.140So I read an article in the paper of my junior year at Tufts that lawyers at Cravath, Swain & Moore, a law firm that probably would never have hired me, while the starting salaries in 1985 were $65,000 a year.
00:04:13.160So my pops was probably making less than that.
00:07:52.160I doubled the amount of the check, and I raised the money.
00:07:54.260And I was fairly non-ideological at that point, and I figured how many times in my life am I going to meet and or know somebody that's going to possibly be the president of the United States?
00:08:04.940It turned out more than one time, but I didn't know that at the time.
00:08:07.720Yeah, I mean, again, your resume on who you've been around is pretty interesting and how it happened.
00:08:11.600And so how did you transition from there into, you know, you started your own firm now.
00:08:16.360You have been around $8 billion under management.
00:08:18.240So I think it's important to tell you that I was at Goldman for seven years.
00:08:21.080I left with a mentor of mine that was a couple years older than me, and 22 years ago at the age of 32, I started something called Oscar Capital Management, which was a registered investment advisor.
00:08:32.100So like yourself and Morgan Stanley Team Weirder, I took all those tests.
00:08:52.540And we've got $10 billion under management, 60 people, four offices.
00:08:57.800And for a very brief shining moment, I was in the comms department as the White House communications director for 11 days for President Trump.
00:09:06.240But I worked on his campaign for a year, and I helped him raise money.
00:09:08.920So you've been around President Obama.
00:09:12.220What is the biggest difference you notice personality-wise between the two?
00:09:15.160I'm going to tell you the biggest similarity, and they probably don't like each other that much, but they'll be mad at me, both of them, for telling you how similar they are, okay?
00:09:33.840The second thing about their personalities, they're very headstrong.
00:09:36.800They see things a certain way, and they're going to drive the agenda.
00:09:40.500There's two different types of leadership, right?
00:09:42.800You know, we've got a thermostat in this room.
00:09:45.700There's a certain type of leadership that says, okay, what's the temperature, and they guide themselves towards the temperature.
00:09:52.160And then there's another type of leadership that's a thermostat.
00:09:54.680I'm going to dial the temperature, and the world's coming my way.
00:09:58.620I'm going to lower the temperature to 72, and the whole world's coming with me, or I'm raising it to 78, and the whole world's coming with me.
00:18:44.580I don't know too many people that walk into the Oval Office and they're not awestruck or they're not awestruck by the magnitude of the presidency
00:18:52.200or they don't start thinking about the person that's behind that desk differently than they did before he got behind the desk.
00:21:53.020Well, I think what ended up happening was the president made correctly an assessment that there was a positive attribution to the Republican Party ground game that helped him attain the presidency.
00:22:04.900And he was trying to reward Priebus, and he thought he was a good administrator.
00:22:08.200But you can't hire the creature of the Black Lagoon to drain the swamp when every impulse, every grain of DNA in the person's body is to add more water, add more swamp water to the swamp.
00:22:21.500And you have to think of what Priebus did.
00:22:22.580Priebus basically blocked every single person from New York that was on the president's team.
00:22:27.600And he couldn't block Javrid and Ivanka, but every other person got blocked.
00:24:25.180The other thing John Kelly did, which I totally disagree with, he was too militant in the job.
00:24:30.240See, his firing of me, not to make this about me, but I'm just giving you a case study example in management.
00:24:37.920The way he fired me and the abrupt way that he fired me actually was the match that he struck for his own demise.
00:24:45.440Because he set the culture up in a way that was militant and intimidating, and it caused people to create more insecurity and more backbiting and more paranoia.
00:24:55.380He could have said to me, hey, Ant, you did a disastrous thing on the phone, and that's an absolutely fireball offense.
00:25:02.340I don't want you working here in the White House.
00:25:04.080But you served the president, and you've been part of his media advocacy.
00:25:09.260You worked on his transition team, and you seem like a good enough guy.
00:25:12.660Why don't you take two weeks off, okay?
00:25:15.100And when you return on Labor Day, we'll come up with a story that you're leaving.
00:25:19.740And so this way, you don't explode out of here.
00:25:22.940Okay, that's what we would have done on Wall Street, right?
00:25:24.740But he wanted to hit me as hard as he could hit me, okay?
00:25:29.500And as I tried to point out to him, you don't fire a guy like me like that.
00:25:32.720Because when you fire a guy like me like that, you're sending an earthquake and a shockwave into the system.
00:25:39.460You're like, oh, my God, if they could fire a guy like him like that, what are they going to do to me?
00:25:43.480And what I told the president is what John did to you was unfortunate because he did something to you that made you look very bad, and it made him look very good.
00:25:56.020But it made him look good, like he's a John tough guy in the John Wayne movie as a U.S. Marine, and you allowed him to do it to one of your buddies that helped you get elected.
00:26:05.100Okay, so it made you look bad, and it made him look good, and it caused the match that gets struck to lead to his demise.
00:26:11.220So my issue with Kelly is more of a managerial issue and the way you interact with people.
00:26:16.580But no, he's not a nefarious, cretin, you know, Leviathan.
00:26:21.160You've always said good things about him as an individual.
00:26:23.480He's not a member of the Leviathan like Rancid Penis or this guy Adolf Bannon.
00:42:59.460It's been a great life experience for me, by the way.
00:43:01.260As miserable and as humiliating as it was at times, the way they tumbled me and they grinded me up and the way they tabloided me, it's been a great life experience.
00:47:30.300Let me explain to you how the lobbying circuit works and you want me to explain to you how they curry favor with each other and how the senators are allowed to insider trade inside the Congress and they're feathering themselves to tens of millions of dollars pursuant to the regulations that are tied to the businesses that they're putting their money in their personal accounts on.
00:48:18.840They want their Social Security checks paid on time, the Medicare paid on time.
00:48:22.360And so they know that the country's overburdened by the entitlements and we're outstretched from a military perspective and all these things.
00:49:11.820Disaffect the people in the middle, sit on the fat tails, the right-leaning guys will stay in power, the left-leaning guys will stay in power, and let's butt heads in the middle so that we can appeal to our bases.
00:49:23.380But what you're suggesting means no term limits.
00:49:30.180I'm suggesting in our national interest, no matter how long you stay in Washington, two presidential terms, a senatorial term, it doesn't matter.
00:49:38.900However, we should collectively be focused less on right- or left-leaning strategies and more on right- or wrong policies.
00:51:25.380Well, I know the Koch brothers looked at a couple of different media properties to potentially buy, and then they thought they'd have to go through too much FCC craziness.
00:51:35.560The government, by and large, is left-leaning, and the policies and the bureaucracies, by and large, left-leaning.
00:51:41.820And so what's weird about the whole thing is that the university's very large percentage of the college professors are left-leaning, yet half of the students are right-leaning.
00:51:51.340So it tells you that brainwashing really doesn't work.
00:51:53.820You know, the number is, Washington Times, now Washington Post, did an article saying, for every one conservative professor, there are 12 liberal professors.
00:52:06.960So there's 87%, 90% that are liberal versus conservative, yet half of the kids are right-leaning and conservative.
00:52:14.160So that tells you something that, you know, you're not going to be able to brainwash people, which is why the left is so scared, right, because that's why they have this whole collective bee swarm, you know.
00:53:59.980Sometimes I just wonder, you know, why from the top some investment.
00:54:02.980If there's ever been a time to be able to buy a Twitter, to be able to buy, you know, the guy from Salesforce just bought Time Magazine for $350 million, which is nothing, to be able to buy some of these platforms.
00:54:13.440I don't even think he paid that much, actually.
00:54:15.160If you really look through the whole thing.
00:54:16.340But the point is, think about how long.
00:54:17.580The return of the deferred account, I only think he paid $180 million.
00:54:20.120But, you know, Time Magazine, when we were kids, is a different thing than it is today.
00:54:25.900It's a well-known brand, but it's, in a fragmented environment, it's a much smaller pizza slice of what it was.
00:54:43.840It's not my, I'm not in love with the paper.
00:54:46.620I'm not in love with the paper's editorial section.
00:54:48.540But he's doing what you're supposed to be doing.
00:54:49.520But I am impressed with what they're doing, okay.
00:54:52.100As an objective bystander, I'm impressed.
00:54:54.280And moreover, I only did one thing of official record in the White House, other than assent to Sarah's position as press secretary.
00:55:04.040I turned the lights and cameras back on.
00:55:06.120People don't remember this, but Sean Spicer had the lights and cameras off, and he was trying to punish the press, not allowing them on television.
00:56:09.560If the Fed raises rates, which I predict that they will, they'll start to slow down the rate hikes to allow the economy a little bit more room for expansion.
00:56:22.640There's actually real stimulating things that are happening in the economy.
00:56:26.840And he's making the economy from a tax effective basis.
00:56:31.620He's making the economy way more competitive globally.
00:56:33.800And so there'll be more flow of global capital into the United States.
00:56:37.200So all those things are very positive.
00:56:39.120The reason why I think he's going to get reelected is that the Mueller investigation, no matter what they say about him, will likely not knock him out of office.
00:56:48.140It will not, in my opinion, it may trigger an impeachment in the House, but it's not going to affect a release of office or a removal from office in the Senate.
00:57:26.320If there's something incriminating, way worse than what we've now been exposed to, and we've had 19 months of this sort of rigorous investigation, you know, you've got to find something.
00:57:36.240If they find something and they nail him to the wall and he's, quote unquote, unindicted or sealed indictment or something like that, maybe he gets knocked out of office.
00:59:57.680Be a little more strategic with the tweeting.
00:59:59.980Use that sense of humor that you were famous for at the 21 Club and famous for on The Apprentice and famous for in places that you and I know that we used to hang out in.