Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE, and at ICE's 12 exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now here's your host, Josh King, head of communications at Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Sitting across from me in the ICE House this morning is a guy I've known many years. He is well known in certain circles, the people who watched CNBC, those who followed him to the Fox Business channel when he took over Wall Street Week, Louis Rukeyser's old show, and those thousands from the hedge fund community who attended his conference in Las Vegas every year. It was to be sure well before the world really got to know him when he stepped in front of the White House podium in the James S. Brady briefing room and started on this riff.
Anthony Scaramucci:
The administration's message out. I think that's going to be one of the big goals for us. I said during the transition, I'll say it up here. I think there's been at times a disconnect between the way we see the president and how much we love the president, and the way some of you perhaps see the president. And I certainly see the American people probably see the president the way I do, but we want to get that message out there. And to use a Wall Street expression, there might be an arbitrage spread between how well we are doing and how well some of you guys think we're doing, and we're going to work hard to close that spread.
Josh King:
Closing that arbitrage spread, something we know very well here at the New York Stock Exchange, where they're reading spreads on thousands of stocks for six and a half hours every single day. Anthony Scaramucci, The Mooch. Full disclosure, he's been a friend for some time, and I was rooting for him on that day in the briefing room, July 21st, 2017, which started a historic 11-day run as White House communications director. Because his big tent philosophy, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, is exactly what we need in Washington today.
Josh King:
Anthony would be the first to tell you though, he didn't get very far with that message in his 11 days in office. He got himself fired for mishandling one of the basic strictures that we in PR are drilled in from the first day in the business, establish your ground rules. He spoke colorfully on a phone call with The New Yorker's then Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, which didn't sit well with the new White House chief of staff, John Kelly. As we'll talk about later, comms director is not the job I urged Anthony to pursue precisely for the kind of hornets' nest he walked into in the West Wing. My conversation with Anthony Scaramucci right after this.
Speaker 4:
Cushman & Wakefield is one of the premier brands in the commercial real estate services space. We have 48,000 professionals around the world in 400 offices in 70 countries. This company, 101 years old if you can imagine, it's never been public. There's a reason they call the NYSE the Big Board. It's a great home for companies like us, big companies with big ideas. Cushman & Wakefield, now listed on the NYSE.
Josh King:
Anthony Scaramucci, co-managing partner at SkyBridge Capital is the author now of his fourth book, Trump, the Blue-Collar President. He hosts a podcast with his wife, Mooch and the Mrs. with his wife Deidre, and is a frequent business and political commentator. You probably know that if you follow him on Twitter, along with 875,000 others. What you might not know is that he grew up in the North Shore of Long Island, then he headed to my hometown Boston to earn his BA in Economics from Tufts and a JD from Harvard Law. And instead of opting into the legal world, Scaramucci headed for Wall Street, getting his start at Goldman Sachs in the investment banking division. He launched his first hedge fund, Oscar Capital Management in 1996, which he sold to Neuberger Berman in 2001. Following his stint in DC, Scaramucci returned to New York City and his investment firm, SkyBridge Capital, which he launched in 2005. Welcome to the New York Stock Exchange.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Wow, it's a big introduction, a lot of stuff going on here. How are you Josh?
Josh King:
I'm good.
Anthony Scaramucci:
I'm loving the ICE House, absolutely gorgeous.
Josh King:
It's the beautiful library rebuilt.
Anthony Scaramucci:
I'm loving the Olympic lighting in here, very, very impressive.
Josh King:
We can credit Jeff Sprecher and Kelly Loeffler for all the design touches. This used to be the place where Dick Grasso and the other executives worked. Now it's completely given over to our 2,400 listed companies.
Anthony Scaramucci:
I love it. I'll tell you one thing though, when Dick was here he had the temperature in his room at about 109 degrees. Okay? And so, "Dick, well, what's going on here? Are you a coldblooded reptile?" He said, "No, no, no. I want people in and out of here in five minutes." And that's exactly what he got.
Josh King:
Was this a building you'd visited a lot of times in the past?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Many times. I worked at Goldman Sachs, I took many people on tours here. I did the Christmas tree lighting with Bobby Valentine after the Mets were in the World Series with the Yankees in 2000. So we came down here and lit the Christmas tree. Dick was down here for that. Obviously after 9/11, I spent a lot of time down here. I was helping Jimmy Dunn and Sandra O'Neal rebuild their trading situation. And so, yeah, no, this is a storied place, and it's a real honor to be here.
Josh King:
How did your parents feel when you didn't head to a white shoe law firm coming out of Harvard?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Well, my parents were actually sore at me that I didn't become a lawyer after going to Harvard Law School. First off, my parents thought that it was Hartford Law School, Josh. They had no clue. So when I told them I got into Harvard, they were like, "We're going to Hartford?" "No ma, no. We're going to Harvard." "No, but isn't it up in Connecticut?" I said, "No ma, it's down the block from Tufts." I mean, they had no clue. They didn't go to college. There were no books in the house. My father started as an hourly worker. He worked 42 years on the stone in Sand Dock in Port Washington. Ken Langone and I built a monument to those Italian, Welsh, and Irish immigrants. That sand embankment is now a golf course, and so we built a monument there. So my parents had no clue.
Josh King:
We're going to get into Gotham Sand in a few minutes. But do you remember, because I know if you had no books in the original Scaramucci household in Long Island. I've been to your place in, Windham, New York, which has walls lined with more books than this library.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah. That's just one of the places, right? I got my house in Manhasset, and I've got books everywhere all over my office. I'm a big book reader, been that way since I was born. Five, six years old, I won the reading competition in the first grade. And so I think you're born with certain skills, nature versus nurture, but I've always been a big reader and to this day.
Josh King:
Do you remember our back and forth about what job you were trying to nab during the transition?
Anthony Scaramucci:
I do. And you gave me great advice, but you have to remember, just to go back to that period of time, the president wanted me to be his chief networking officer. I had accepted a job offer from the president to be the director of the office of public liaison, which is to basically help him network in the outside world.
Anthony Scaramucci:
I had gone to his office 26 floor, Trump Tower, president-elect and laid out from all 435 Congressional Districts. I had identified the top 20 donors, Josh. Republican or Democrat did not matter. Here's the top 20 donors, sir. These are 8,700 people that you and I need to traffic with, and I will bring them through the White House, the West Wing, the OEB, the Old Executive Office Building. And I will get them immersed in what we're trying to do as it relates to a pro-business agenda for America.
Anthony Scaramucci:
My buddy, Reince Priebus, who I'd given at least a half a million dollars to when he was the RNC chair, you could see daggers of envy coming out of his eyeballs, and he was going to do anything he could to slice my throat. So his agenda was more personal and less about the public interest and the public service of the country. And this is what you learn about people in Washington, which you knew intuitively and your friends like Brian Steel over at CNBC and the kid that's running Goldman's PR, Jake Stewart.
Josh King:
Jake Stewart.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah. You guys know this, that it's a viper den. There's a woman by the name of Dina Powell, you may remember Dina. Dina told me, "However bad you think Washington is, you have no idea until you get there."
Josh King:
But I knew that Anthony, and that's why I thought Rick's job at state department, assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy. You take that for two years, you'd be the next UN ambassador based on where Heather Nauert is today.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah. God bless her. I think it's great for her. Did she get it today? I didn't-
Josh King:
I don't know.
Anthony Scaramucci:
... know it had been disclosed.
Josh King:
It hasn't been confirmed.
Anthony Scaramucci:
I like Heather. I think she's great. I think she'll do a good job. I'm very good friends with secretary Pompeo's son, Nick. I like what secretary Pompeo's doing. That was the right call politically, but you have to understand I'm not politically minded. I'm the accidental entrant into all of this. I've basically been an entrepreneur my whole life. I do write this in my book. I didn't spend any time on television for 21 years of my Wall Street career. It wasn't until the 2008 crisis, and I needed to market this conference that I call SALT, as an idea to bring people back into the conference base that I went on television. So my first foray into television was at age 46. And my first foray into politics was at age 53. So I don't know what else I can tell you, actions always speak louder than words. I'm not that politically minded, and of course, that's how I got kicked so hard in the teeth.
Josh King:
But I've always known you as such a peace and love kind of guy. I saw you a perfect diplomat. Let's talk about grandparents and parents for a second, and why Windham Mountain in the Catskills is only 1,893 feet in elevation and a nice family hill instead of one of the greatest skiing havens in the world rivaling the Himalayas.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah, well, absolutely happened. And so the ice sheet came down from the North Pole, I don't know, it was probably 50 million years ago, and cut all of those mountains literally down to these little molehills that we have now. Windham's a great ski, great family mountain as you know. And I've been up there for 15 years teaching my children how to ski, but when that ice sheet came down, crumpled those mountain ranges, when it receded, it took thousands of years for it to melt off obviously.
Anthony Scaramucci:
It left the remnants, the glacial debris. I was born on a glacial debris site basically known as Long Island. So it left Long Island, Block Island, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket. The elbow of Cape Cod is a glacier recession. And one of the most fascinating things about that island is it's a very interesting mixture of sand, because there's a lot of salt, stone, and granite in the sand, which actually comes from Canada is deposited down on Long Island. Why is that so interesting? Well, that sand mixture mixes unbelievably well with cement. 65% of the concrete and certainly this building that we're sitting in is probably from my hometown. And so what ended up happening was that sand got mined from that embankment, it got brought by barges through the Throggs Neck over to Long Island City, where it was mixed with the concrete.
Anthony Scaramucci:
The 59th Street Bridge now known as the Ed Koch Bridge, they trucked it over here and they built these skyscrapers with that sand. 65 years, my dad worked there for 42 of them, and it's now a golf course today. A beautiful golf course today, but that is a byproduct of my hometown. And by the way, that was a great blue collar life, very high wages for my dad's employment. And I grew up in a middle class area. We had air conditioners in the windows, we had Sears Toughskins-
Josh King:
Air conditioners that went in in the spring and out in the fall, just like they were in Massachusetts where I grew up.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Amen. And we had Sears Toughskins, a Schwinn bicycle that we used to fight over. I mean, my only hardship, and I'm just saying it tongue in cheek, was that there were five of us in that house sharing one bedroom. And man, if I didn't get up before my sister, I wasn't taking a shower before school.
Josh King:
I mean, it certainly reminds me of an anthem that we all grew up with. Let's hear that.
Josh King:
(singing).
Josh King:
So that's Billy Joel, Movin' Out. And you, Anthony, were looking at your-
Anthony Scaramucci:
Great song.
Josh King:
... grandfather's arrival from Italy into Pennsylvania. Your father starts at Gotham Sand. And you could have ended up at a college on Long Island, but instead you see the opening and you make your way to Tufts.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah. So that was again accidental. And so you have to remember entrepreneurs know, and people that have been as fortunate as you and I, we know that there's a lot of providential things that happen. Yes, we make our own luck, but you also got to get lucky in certain respects. And so Billy Tomasso who is now deceased, he was a friend of my dad's. He worked for Tilcon Tomasso in Connecticut, and he took a real liking to my father.
Anthony Scaramucci:
My father was a dispatcher weighing trucks, and he was selling a crushed aggregate to be mixed with that sand on Long Island. And he told my pops, he said, "Don't send your kids to CW Post." That's where we were all intending on going. "Send your kids to a place called Tufts University." And my father thought it was spelled T-O-U-G-H-S, he had no clue.
Josh King:
So Hartford and Toughs.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Hartford and Toughs, and those are my parents. My mother says the word trauma, traumia. I mean, they don't really read that much, so they get a lot of these words discombobulated, but my father basically came home one night, I'll never forget this. I have an older brother. And Turner, my older brother, says, "Forget CW post. You guys are going to Tufts." And so my brother had this big fat phone book looking book known as the Barron School of Colleges. He opened up the book, we got to Tufts. My brother looked at my dad and said, "This is most selective dad, we're not getting into this school. I mean, what are you talking about," right?
Anthony Scaramucci:
And my father, "No, no, this guy, Billy Tomasso, he's a great guy. He's going to introduce you to people there and blah blah." And so my brother went to Tufts, and it was like Henry Ford said about those cards, you could have any color that you want as long as it was black. That was my father's attitude with me. And thankfully, the grades were just good enough, the SAT score. And a little bit of nudge from Billy, I got myself into Tufts after my brother.
Anthony Scaramucci:
We're the only two people in our generation of Scaramuccis and DeFeos that actually went to college. And so it's been an interesting life because I've got clamors in my family, I've got auto glass installers, I've got auto collision people, deli managers, pizzeria owners. It's an eclectic mix. And those people like Trump. And so that's one of the big essence of the book that I just wrote. It's not that Trump himself is blue collar. Duh, he was born with a golden toilet seat underneath him. It's that he was able to capture the imagination of the people I grew up with, and I tried to explain why.
Josh King:
We're going to go through a little bit of your Wall Street career and SALT in a few minutes, but I want to skip way ahead, past all that for a minute to talk about the 11 days. And really also, maybe what people might not know about the, call it the three, five, seven days before. How did those days unfold leading up to your first moments in the podium?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Somebody said to me, "Anthony, you're a smart guy, but you're politically naive." I think was the Playboy magazine interviewer. And he says, "People say you're a smart guy, but you're politically naive." I'm like, "Dude, I'm not politically naive. I'm politically naive to the 20th power." Didn't see the shots coming, and that's the truth. And so Priebus and Bannon were hell bent on blocking me from the OPL job. They could have just been very straight with me instead of all the shenanigans and opposition research, and leaking, and all that sort of stuff. And so what I did was a very unfortunate thing for myself, and I want to share it with your listeners so that they can learn from it. I put my pride and my ego in the decision-making, Josh.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Once I realized that Priebus and Bannon were maliciously blocking me from a job that the president promised me, I got my pride and ego involved, and then I turned the chainsaw on and put the hockey mask on from Jason's Halloween movie, and went after those two guys. And so the week before I got the job, the president and I were having conversations. I went to see him and met him in the study off the Oval with Ivanka. He said, "I'm going to make you the coms director." I said, "I'm not really that well suited for it. Let me see if I can get Bill Shine down here, former president of Fox News."
Josh King:
Who eventually took the job.
Anthony Scaramucci:
"He's way more suited for it." He said, "Oh, you're good at restructuring, you're a good entrepreneur. Come in here and help me eliminate some of these leakers, and let's get this thing on track." And so that night, Priebus and Bannon were desperate to find a way to block me. And then that morning, when the president was going to make the announcement about me joining, at 10:00 AM, Steve Bannon called me and said, "You know what your chances are to be the comms director here over at the White House today?" I said, "No, Steven, what are they?" "Zero. Zero." I said, "All right, well, you don't have president in front of your last name bro." I said, "Maybe they are, if you had president in front of your last name, but the guy that has president in front of his last name, I got it at 100%. Let's see what happens."
Anthony Scaramucci:
And then the full fight started, and so I made a mistake on the phone. That's obviously something I have to totally own, I'm obviously very accountable for. But this was an Italian kid from a neighborhood next door to mine whose father had worked with my dad in that construction industry for 50 years. So Frank Lizza, Ryan's father, knew my father, knew my family for 50 years, so I didn't think he was going to do that to me. I didn't think I needed to say it was quote unquote, off the record. Howie Kurtz from Media Buzz, Fox News channel, 40 years in Washington he's never seen a reporter do that to a White House official like that. Obviously, Rahm Emanuel did some share of cursing and other people, but he got me.
Josh King:
What number day in the 11 was that conversation with Ryan?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Seven or eight.
Josh King:
Were you enjoying the job thinking about actually being communications director and all that entails? Or did you realize that this is not for me?
Anthony Scaramucci:
No. I knew it wasn't for me. I was actually bringing Bill Shine in to replace me. And what I was talking to the president about is maybe I could be a senior advisor here to help you restructure and get the culture right inside the White House, because it was like literally a civil war going on between the Trump loyalists and the RNC people. And what Priebus did was he flooded the zone with RNC people. What Kelly has done is just tried to flood the zone with Kelly loyalists, irrespective of the president. And that's why you're getting these anonymous New York Times articles, and that's why you're getting this nastiness and this vitriol, and books like fear because at the end of the day, they don't like the president.
Anthony Scaramucci:
No, he's like the chef in the kitchen that's going to last four to eight years. They're the little cockroaches moving around on the floor. They're signaling to the other cockroaches outside the building, "Hey, I'm still with you cockroaches. I'm still with you. I'm not with this guy. I'm with you." They think that their system of disgust and they think that their self interested feathering each other is going to last forever. But the bad news for them is that Trump has exposed to the American people how bad they are. We all thought that they were bad, but now we know that they're even worse than we thought. You see that? And so that's going to mean monumental changes coming for Washington over the next 10 years.
Josh King:
But whether you're at the White House or at SkyBridge, or at Goldman, at some point there's a way to get smacked in the face, hang on for a couple days, and the storm blows over. That Monday morning, you go into John Kelly's office, and he wants you out. And you're thinking, "Well, maybe I can survive." And he says, "Not in this town."
Anthony Scaramucci:
I was thinking about the Access Hollywood tape, right? The guy's a joke. Okay? Look, I mean, he couldn't bring one person into the White House. I respect his 40 year career in the Marine Corps, God bless him, but I mean, don't watch too many John Wayne movies, that doesn't necessarily mean he's a good guy. I mean, the guy has hurt the president, he said bad things about the president, he's hurt the culture and the morale inside the White House. But I get why he fired me, and I get why the president allowed him to fire me. Because look, I made a mistake. There was a lot of hysteria at that time.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Upon hindsight and reflection, what I did in comparison to the mosaic of what's going on is a tiny pin dot. Having said that, it was a total blessing for me, because I was able to return to New York, get my business back. My business is surging again, it's back in regrowth mode. But the most important thing Josh, is that I was having a terrible time in my marriage, and you've met my wife and you know my wife, and I love my wife, and I needed to repair that. And so I went back, and we ended the divorce, thankfully, and we've reconciled. And you referenced our podcast. She's a liberal, not in love with the president, let's just put it mildly like that. And we have a sparring contest. It's much cheaper than therapy to have a 35 minute public podcast every Tuesday, so we'll be doing that podcast tomorrow.
Josh King:
So Anthony, let's look ahead to the next two years. If you're president Trump and dealing with the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and a Democratic controlled house of representatives, tell me about how to notch some winning plays in the West Wing?
Anthony Scaramucci:
So to me, and again, I don't know if they'll do this or not because I think what happens to the president, I think he's understaffed and not well staffed. I'm just going to be totally candid here. So if he was staffed with his loyalists and people that want to appeal to the better angels of his personality, the better angels of his nature, would say Mr. President, cut the deal on immigration, cut the deal on infrastructure. You're going to tie up the deal, and I predict this, that he'll have a Chinese trade deal done by January. Cut those other two deals. They won't be perfect deals, but that's the state of America.
Anthony Scaramucci:
The Founders wanted us to compromise. Go into the 2020 election with a list of great things. Economy's growing, you've delayered and deregulated the economy, you cut the slack at the border, which tightened up the labor markets for the African American, Hispanic American labor forces. Let's approach it from that directive, and let's go after these independence that you need. Your base is going to stay with you. Somebody should say to the president, and I've said it, but reemphasize it. He once said he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and keep his base. Remember he said that?
Josh King:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Anthony Scaramucci:
Okay. So if you can shoot people on Fifth Avenue and keep your base, well, let's try to be nice. How about trying to be nice for a little while, because you're still going to be able to keep your base if you're a little bit nicer. I think you've got a 5% to 7% headwind in your face as a result of the coarseness of the operating communication style right now, the coarseness of what's going on on Twitter, and the incendiary messages that are out there that are scaring people. So why don't we dial that back? We know you're a good guy. I've known you for 20 years. The rabbi in Pittsburgh, I don't know if you caught that. He said, "Hey, listen, I was in a private conversation with him, and I found him to be heartfelt and gregarious, and warm." That's the guy that I know. Why don't we go with more of that over the next two years and less of the other stuff.
Anthony Scaramucci:
That would be my recommendation. I just want to say one last thing. The word sycophancy, that word to me is tied not to loyalty, it's tied to selfishness and self-interest, and self preservation. The word loyalty is tied to the word honesty. And good leaders are able to take their friends who love them, telling them the truth, as opposed to sitting around saying, "Oh geez, I'm afraid I'm going to get fired. Let me say something that I think this leader wants to hear as opposed to telling them the truth."
Josh King:
I listened to your podcast with Kara Swisher. And one thing that you talked about in your years coming up through the ranks on Wall Street was your ability to read and analyze people, recruit, nurture, develop, mentor, et cetera.
Anthony Scaramucci:
It could be my only skillset actually. I mean, honestly, the good Lord gives everybody different skill sets. I know how to mix and match people. And you think about all the things I'm able to do, that's because I'm able to delegate and find good money managers, find good conference organizers, find good people to help me run a podcast, find good people to help me raise money. You know what I mean?
Josh King:
Yeah. And so throughout the book, you were also saying what a quick read the president is, but go back to that statement that you made about a White House that is poorly staffed or understaffed. Why can't they get the good people and the right people in there, more people with sensibilities like yours?
Anthony Scaramucci:
So first of all, the swamp people absolutely hate the guy. You have to remember, he's like an organ transfer, like a transplant into them. The immunological system of the swamp is up. They need to reject this guy. They can't afford to have Jeff Bezos come in and other billionaires. Doesn't have to be a right-leaning billionaire from New York, any billionaire. The swamp is feathering it's nest with each other. I don't even think it's a swamp, Josh. It's probably a gold plated hot tub with no drain. And so what they do is they look at you and they say, "Okay, this guy, can he be bought?" Or, "He can't be bought." Bought, can't be bought. Oh, you can be bought? Come into the hot tub with us. Here's two bottles of crystal, here's some cubanos, let's go. We're going to insider trade in the congress. We're going to take money from over here, move it into your family. We're going to move this into your friend's private equity fund. You help us wash our back, we'll wash yours. Who cares really about the American people?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Let's rack up $21 trillion of debt. The infrastructure can crumble. The educational system can be uneven. We can kill a million people in the middle east, kill 6,000 service men and women, injure 60,000 of them, lose 22 a day to PSTD. Who cares? We're in the tub together. We're sharing the love here in the tub. Or they look at you and say, "Cannot be bought." Okay, that guy can't be bought. We better do some opposition research on them. We should finish him. When I left that podium, you had a quip of my thing. 55 million people saw my press conference. When I left, the president loved it, but I got a call from an opp person, you know Washington. I got a call from an opp person that was a Republican, known the person for 30 years. The person said to me, "You're dead."
Anthony Scaramucci:
I said, "I'm dead? I thought that was a pretty good press conference?" "No, no, no, no. You're completely dead." I said, "Why am I dead?" He goes, "You were telling the truth from the White House. You're not allowed to do that in this town. Can't tell the American people the truth. I've got five different senior senators asking me, "Dig up some stuff on this guy. We got to get him out of there." 11 days later, I'm gone. I obviously made a mistake, but I was going anyway. Like I told Steve Colbert, I was trying to last longer than a carton of milk in a refrigerator, but I knew I was on my way out. I knew my duration in Washington, the half life was accelerating.
Josh King:
So your recipe in the second half of the first term on policy is to try and get some deals done, get immigration done, get infrastructure done. How do you pivot if you're the president in terms of your relationship with the fourth estate, the media in the next two years? We've seen over the last six months, maybe a different Trump than the first year.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Influence the bill.
Josh King:
A person who will do longer conversations, who will stand out in the scrum. He's a more regular walker up to the pool. As he goes out to Marine One on the South Lawn, he'll take questions. He'll parry back and forth. Seems a little bit like he's enjoying the fray a little bit more?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Sprays in the Oval Office, and I think that's more the influence of Bill Shine. I mean, it's old now, but if you went onto the web and you punched in Scaramucci's coms plan, you would see a four page plan that I wrote. And one of the things was, let the president be the president. Let's cut the divide and the gap. It's very hard to colorize someone if they're doing live television. So if you want to call me Tony Goompa, you want to call me the situation at the White House, all this other stuff, that's fine, you can do it in print.
Anthony Scaramucci:
But if you're with me on a live television show, it's very hard to do that because I'm a reasonably well educated, well-read person. And so my point with the president is put him out there, he's a big dog, he's a media star, he was a television star. Put him out there. He's a charming gregarious guy, and he may not agree with the journalist that's hitting him, but he'll get his voice out there. People will look at him and quietly say, "Not so bad. The guy's actually not as bad as they're saying." The whisper rate on the president is up, Josh.
Anthony Scaramucci:
What's the whisper rate? "Hey Anne, I'm here in Silicon Valley. I tell everybody I hate the president, but let me just tell you something, I voted for him. I'm going to vote for him again." The whisper rate, Josh, is up on the guy. Okay? And that's because of what he's doing. He's expanding the perimeter of the people that he's talking to, but they got to deescalate and end the war declaration on the media. That's a very silly thing, never going to help the president. He doesn't need to be at war in the media. I write in the book, my first day before my press conference, I'm in the Oval with him. I'm sitting across from him at the Resolute desk. He says to me, "Hey man, how did this happen? I had a 45 year great relationship with the media. How did this happen?" I said, "Well, you let Bannon declare war on them. And every time they hit you, you hit them back 15 times.
Anthony Scaramucci:
And so now they think they're at war with you. Let's deescalate. Oh, here's the other thing we're doing, sir. We're turning the lights and cameras back on in that room. If I'm doing the press conference, the cameras are going to be on. This is the United States. I believe in the First Amendment, you believe in the First Amendment, sir. These people are there for a reason. The Founders put them there to hold people in power accountable, and we're going to open the lights and turn on the cameras. And so that's another reason why Ryan got blasted so hard. A lot of people in the press felt that what he did to me was very, very unfair. He lost his job at the New Yorker, lost his job at the Rolling Stones. And this guy is rolling downhill because that's what happens when you're that bad of a Karmic person.
Josh King:
So you dial up the nice a little bit in the next two years, both policy and with the press?
Anthony Scaramucci:
No question.
Josh King:
Do you dial back some of the extreme negativity on Twitter, if you're the president? And-
Anthony Scaramucci:
I think so.
Josh King:
... try and have a sunnier disposition?
Anthony Scaramucci:
I think so. Sunny wins. James Fallows was on Fareed Zakaria, would be yesterday. He said, "Well, you got a pretty sunny disposition given the fact what happened to you."
Josh King:
Fallows looks at people like Hoover, negative. He talks about Ronald Reagan, positive.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Sunny. But Fallows says to me, "You got a really sunny disposition." He tweeted it out yesterday after-
Josh King:
I saw.
Anthony Scaramucci:
... the show. I said, "Jim," I said, "You got to understand something. I'm one of the luckiest people that have ever, ever lived. I wake up every morning, and I thank God for my life. And I have great gratitude and appreciation. Are you kidding me? I came from a blue collar family. I was able to go to Tufts and Harvard Law School, build two successful hedge fund businesses, and have a voice in the debate, an intellectual voice in the debate. How could I not feel blessed by all that? "Oh, but you got beat up by the media and excoriate a big deal."
Anthony Scaramucci:
As I told my son after I got fired, a week after, I said, "You watch what I do with this." But you just have to understand something, it's not a health issue. And one of the chapters of my book is the 12th day, which is a metaphorical chapter about inspiration, persistence, tenacity. If you're a young person reading my book, wake up. Your life is not going to go exactly the way you planned, and when you hit the floor, you better bounce like a super bowl. You better not be fragile due to the helicoptering of your parents. Okay? You got to bounce off the floor like a super bowl.
Josh King:
And we're going to get to the 12th day, the resurgence of the SALT conference, and what's next for Anthony Scaramucci right after this.
Speaker 5:
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Josh King:
Welcome back here today with Anthony Scaramucci co-managing partner of SkyBridge Capital. We've been discussing what happened to him at the White House in his infamous 11 days as communications director, what brought him to Washington D.C. In the first place. Now let's start looking forward, Anthony, let's talk about the economy right now. Last month brought the return of volatility and some real concern about another October correction. What are your thoughts on the market? And are we in for a more smooth November?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Well, I think the bold thesis for the market is still very much intact. Because if you look at where the economic growth is and the fundamentals and bear markets don't arise just from old age in a bull market, the bull market will die from deteriorating fundamentals, not from old age. So I think it's intact, and I believe that if we slow down the interest rate cycle a little bit, it'll help it. But I also understand because of the heavy deficit spending why the fed is being aggressive to try to get ahead of potential inflation.
Josh King:
I listened to your podcast with David Axelrod, which you did about six months ago. You were showing that 10 year treasuries were still under 3% as a sign that the economy is still healthy. They're now at 3.197%. You still feel bullish?
Anthony Scaramucci:
I do because you now have the growth. Remember when the treasury was back there six months ago, we were tracking 1.5%, 2% growth. Okay, but not super great, sort of mama bear economy. Now you've got a popa bear economy, so that higher rate number is actually a real rate, not an inflationary rate. And what you know if you're trained as an economist, is that the real interest rates being high are actually good for the market and the economy. That means that businesses know that they can deploy that capital, they're paying a higher price for it, but they're going to get an even higher return, high real rates. In the 90s, we had an explosive bull market.
Josh King:
After a relatively quiet couple of weeks, you mentioned this earlier in the podcast, China-US trade entered the news cycle late last week. I want to hear a little bit from CNBC.
Speaker 6:
Out of market participants paying some attention to that report, which suggested that the president had told people around him to begin drafting the terms of a deal in terms of trade with China. But people should be cautious with that report. It is out there, but I've talked to a senior administration official this morning who says there's no truth to it. A senior administration official telling me there's still a long way to go in the negotiations between the United States and China on that. And that mirrors what you've heard administration officials saying publicly throughout.
Josh King:
So markets gyrate widely when the president tweets out that he has a long conversation with president Xi, but you're long-term optimistic that a deal will get done.
Anthony Scaramucci:
No question. I know the guy. I mean, I told people six weeks before the Canadian deadline, he's cutting the deal before the deadline, and he cut the deal. He's got this deal in his head being finished no later than the end of January, because I know the guy. He's not going into the back half of the presidential term, with the deal unsettling in China. And he talks to enough business people to know that unsettling could affect business confidence, and he doesn't want that. So it'll get done.
Josh King:
You've got many projects going on, Anthony, from the book launch, to the podcast, to the work that you're doing in the media, yet you return to SkyBridge as co-managing partner earlier this year. The SALT conference is going to be restarted next year after its one year hiatus. If you're talking about moving forward, why go back to the old recipe that you had?
Anthony Scaramucci:
The love of my professional life is SkyBridge Capital. I built that place, three people. It's now 60 people, four offices, $11 billion under management. I've got a great conference business, and we are a thought leader in the space. We're going to do an event in the Middle East in October, which will be an unbelievable event. We just got back from scouting sites there. And so for me, this is a real love of my life. I've never felt like I was working any day that I've been at SkyBridge.
Josh King:
So correct me if my numbers are wrong, Anthony, but I think you have about 41,000 clients.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Correct.
Josh King:
And you mentioned $12 billion in assets under management. The fund of funds have drawn their share of skepticism based on the extra management fees on top of the funds you're bundling, and they're mixed record of beating the market. But the barrier to entry is less than that of a traditional hedge fund. Why'd you opt to go that route? And how's it playing out?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Listen, the moniker, fund to funds, certainly is a headwind for our business. Oh, people say fund to funds, and I can't invest in it. The media says bad stuff about it. But what we really created at SkyBridge was an outsourced multi-strat model. And so we have a macro team that outsources to the best and brightest money managers in those different sectors, as opposed to building an internal system. We get fee rebates from all of those managers. So we're into those managers at 1.2 and 12. If you add our fee on, we're lower price than Citadel, we're lower price than Millennium, lower price than Och-Ziff. And I would argue that our returns net of fees are as good as any of those people, if not better.
Anthony Scaramucci:
We've had a high single digit rate of return with 25% of the volatility over the last 10 years. And this was a great month for us. The market was down roughly nine in change. We were down 44 basis points. We're up five and a half, six on the year. And I predict 2019 will be a very, very big year for us. So our goal, high single digit rate of return with low volatility, low standard deviation. My team has been in place, something I'm very proud of. You got to think about this. I've got world class money managers at SkyBridge. You know Josh, I don't manage that money. My team's been in place for 13 years. That tells you that we know what we're doing in terms of running a business and comping people very, very well, and giving them a high quality of life inside the organization.
Josh King:
You said I think, that your plan is to get from where you currently are, $12 billion in assets under management to $20 billion?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yes.
Josh King:
What's the path there?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah. So that's 6% growth in our core business that gets us another $5 billion or $6 billion over the next seven years. And then I'm hoping to create an opportunity zone fund to take advantage of the new tax code. I think there's $1 billion to $3 billion of opportunity there for us. And low and behold, there's your dough. That's how you get yourself to $20 billion.
Josh King:
So Anthony, you said of the upcoming SALT Conference, "Our 2019 program is on track to be the most comprehensive and diverse in the 10 year history of SALT." I remember the last time I went there, you had former defense secretary, Robert Gates. I shutter to think that you might have former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, among your speaker lineup. But what do you have in store for 2019?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Well, I hope not and General Mattis' case, because he's a terrific guy, and he's been a very additive to the president's administration. But we'll have an eclectic mix. We'll have existing members of the administration, I had dinner with Jared and Ivanka on Friday night talking about that. Obviously, we're going to wait to announce that stuff into January, but we'll have Republicans and Democrats represented. We'll have thought leaders in education, thought leaders in entertainment, we'll have policy wonks there. We're going to have a little bit of AI there, and we're going to have a little bit of crypto Josh, because you know I'm an old fogie at this point in my life, and I know nothing about crypto, and I know I need to know something about crypto.
Josh King:
You've described your current relationship with president Trump as FBL, fired but loyal. Care to explain?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah, I mean, that's me, Corey, David Bossy, there's a large group of us that have been fired for different reasons. Politically discarded, if you will, but still like him, and are still wanting him to succeed and execute large elements of his agenda. I'm fired, but loyal and honest. I don't want to be fired, but loyal and sycophantic. I don't think that's valuable to anybody.
Josh King:
We had Arkansas Congressman, French Hill, on the podcast recently to talk about his career, which has transitioned from public to private service many times. He described the draw of public service to be a responsibility of American citizenship. Do you foresee another foray into politics in an advisory or even an elected capacity? Perhaps future governor Scaramucci?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah. I think it'd be impossible for me to be governor because I'm a resident of the state of New York. And just look at the voter registration, I don't think you could make the math work. Also, I think my wife-
Josh King:
We had governor George Pataki. We had governor Nelson Rockefeller. I think of you as a Rockefeller Republican.
Anthony Scaramucci:
We'll see. I'm certainly a Rockefeller Republican. I'm pro gay marriage, I'm pro-choice, I'm all of those things on the social issues, and I'm just right of center business-wise. But what I do see is myself engaged in the political punditry, myself engaged in the debate, and it wouldn't be beyond me if I saw somebody that I thought was really going to try to disrupt this disgusting system that we have in place in Washington, that I would be someone that would champion and support that person, he or she.
Josh King:
We started our conversation talking about your love of books. One book that is woven throughout of Trump, the Blue-Collar President is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I just want to hear a quick line from the movie.
Speaker 7:
The moon rose higher. And as I stood there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come such a long way and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
Josh King:
Anthony, you write that Fitzgerald died broke at age 44 from alcoholism. You note that one of the famous lines in The Great Gatsby is, "There are no second acts in American life." But you're living probably your fifth act right now.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah, I think that was one of the things that F. Scott Fitzgerald got wrong. I wrote that in the book. But what obviously attracted me to that book my whole life, first of all, I think it is the quintessential best American novel bar none. It's still selling a half a million copies a year for good reason. It's a phenomenal book about the access to the American dream, the nefarious nature of Gatsby himself, and his love interest, Daisy. The complexity of their lives as America is coming of age and rising in superpower status. So it's an unbelievable metaphorical book in so many different ways.
Anthony Scaramucci:
But what Fitzgerald says is that there are no second acts in American life. And that was probably at a time of that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants work ethic, where there was some Calvinism there, where you had to be very, very strict. And if you deviated, you got dropped into the sewer hole. That's not the case in America today. The Judaical Christian aspect of America is about redemption and forgiveness, and the great American comeback story. And I think Fitzgerald would be surprised today in 2018 to see all the different comebacks, and the aspirations and inspirations there too that are quintessentially American, and would make this country such a special place.
Josh King:
You've worked so hard over 30 years to get where you've got, to fight back when you've been knocked down to the canvas, to get come back number one, come back number two, come back number three. And it takes a toll, it costs a lot of time and effort, and time away from your family. One song that you reference in the book is Harry Chapin's Cats in the Cradle. Just hear a little bit of that.
Josh King:
(singing).
Josh King:
One of the things you did at that low point leaving the White House was you got on the plane and you flew to California to spend time with AJ. I think it was a restorative moment for you to realize that for all the work that you need to put in, talk about that lineage that's brought Alessandro Scaramucci to Pennsylvania and then your dad into Gotham Sand in Long Island, to reconnect with family.
Anthony Scaramucci:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's the point. That's the last chapter of my book. I'm trying to explain to people, listen, I made a decision to create my own arc of the American dream and my own level of aspiration. The very bad news associated with that, it takes an enormous amount of time, energy, and effort. The good news is that in America you can be rewarded for those things. And I was trying to show my children that hard work and that good example, some of it cost me quality time with them and some quantity time.
Anthony Scaramucci:
I'm not going to BS people and pretend that I was all things to all people at every moment, but here's the one thing. Okay, I love those people intensely, I love them unconditionally. And I have tried to explain to them, these are the choices that I made to make your life better and to give you a much better optionality range for outcomes in your life. And so listen, like every family, we've had some levels of dysfunction. I went through a divorce. I speak very fondly of my first wife, she's a very good person. We were just mismatched getting married at age 24. Having said that, she's been a great mom. And I speak very lovingly of my wife, Deidre, where we were at odds because I was misplaced.
Anthony Scaramucci:
I'll leave you with this one last thought. In the movie, It's A Wonderful Life, the character that Jimmy Stewart is playing crashes the car on the bridge, bumps his head. He comes out of the car and man, he's in an alternative universe, where everything is going awry. And he's like, "Jesus, if I could only get my own life back. If I could only get back to where I was, I'd be so grateful and so appreciative of everything." And I've lived that. And so my message to people is love what you have, be grateful, be appreciative, and go forward, and be aspirational. And by the way, there's no reason not to be sunny, you're living in America.
Josh King:
He has his old life back. He's the author of his fourth book, Trump, the Blue-Collar President. And he also has the resurgence of the SALT Conference, early next year in Las Vegas, Nevada. Anthony Scaramucci, thank you so much for joining us in SS?
Anthony Scaramucci:
Big honor to be on here, Josh. Thank you.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Anthony Scaramucci, co-managing partner of SkyBridge Capital. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @nyse. Our show is produced by Theresa DeLuca, Pete Asch, and Ian Wolf, and with production assistants from Ken Abel and Steven Portner. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of this information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or recommendation of any security or trading practice.
