Transcript
Speaker: Today we're here with a tremendous guest, if I might say so.
Speaker: So John, could you give us a quick intro?
Speaker: So yes, today we are joined by a very special guest.
Speaker: We have Anthony Scaramucci on the podcast today.
Speaker: Anthony has had a truly fascinating life, starting as a successful investment banker, founding Skybridge Capital in 2005.
Speaker: Since then, he has become famous for his short tenure as White House Communications Director under Donald Trump, and also for being the host of the Rest is Politics USA podcast.
Speaker: He also hosts the very tremendous open book with Anthony Scaramucci.
Speaker: Guys, pleasure to be on with you guys.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So Anthony, the first question we'd like to ask is, you know, you've had a great career, you've done it all from politics, investment banking, to writing your own book from Wall Street to the White House and back, the Scaramucci Guide to Unbreakable Resilience, which I thoroughly recommend to all our listeners.
Speaker: So what makes you get up in the morning and, you know, a bit of your personal philosophy maybe?
Speaker: Well, I mean, what gets me up in the morning, you know, I grew up with no money, guys.
Speaker: OK, so you guys are in Great Britain or the United Kingdom and you have a little bit more of a cash system in the United Kingdom.
Speaker: But in the United States, people don't care.
Speaker: OK, so my father was a crane operator.
Speaker: It's a blue collar worker.
Speaker: I certainly don't speak with the right accent.
Speaker: And, you know, because, you know, the UK is different, right?
Speaker: They can pick out.
Speaker: your accent, the family you're from, color of your skin, and all of a sudden they're like blocking you into certain positions.
Speaker: And there's a little bit of sclerosis in terms of mobility, but not in the United States.
Speaker: So I'm from a family of like peasant farmers and laborers and blue collar workers.
Speaker: And so what motivates me is I had this opportunity in one lifetime to create generational wealth for my family because I live in a land of opportunity.
Speaker: So I get my ass up every morning.
Speaker: I'm very fired up, whether it's a good or a bad day, to get going on things, see if I can create some wealth and have some fun along the way.
Speaker: Interestingly, Anthony, socially, how far would you say the U.S. has changed from when you were younger?
Speaker: Is it still similar to that sort of social class system you're describing?
Speaker: It's changed.
Speaker: It's harder for poor people to get ahead now.
Speaker: We fractured the K through 12 public education system.
Speaker: So it's very uneven now.
Speaker: In rich areas of the country, the public education is quite good.
Speaker: In poor areas of the country, it's not so good.
Speaker: We hollowed out our manufacturing over the last 35 years.
Speaker: We signed something called the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, which sort of unified from a trade perspective Canada and Mexico.
Speaker: It was good for their economies.
Speaker: It was good for prices in the U.S. It probably wasn't great for the middle class because the hollowing of our manufacturing led to 65,000 factories leaving the United States.
Speaker: And so we offshored.
Speaker: Lots of manufacturing, which left a lot of people feeling economically desperational.
Speaker: So it's different today.
Speaker: We're at each other's throats a little more because of social media.
Speaker: Social media is like smoking for your brain.
Speaker: It causes mental health issues.
Speaker: Everyone's got FOMO or they feel bad that they're not on a yacht or flying privately or some nonsense because they...
Speaker: see other people doing it on social media.
Speaker: And so, yeah, we're strained.
Speaker: We're polarized.
Speaker: There's a very there's a group of people in the country that don't like what happened to their ancestors.
Speaker: And so let's just state it plaintively, you know, several hundred years of enslavement in the United States.
Speaker: Black.
Speaker: Americans whose families were slaves, they feel that that was really unfair, that the economic rent from their family members, all that work, all that labor benefited the white people in the South at the great detriment of the black people.
Speaker: And now that those people have some political power, they are flexing.
Speaker: And that's causing a lot of angst in white communities.
Speaker: I mean, look, these are real issues.
Speaker: And ultimately, you need healing servant leadership
Speaker: to bring people together to push the country forward in the right direction.
Speaker: So moving on to leadership, obviously you're quite well known for having served under President Trump as White House Director of Communications.
Speaker: There's nothing like getting fired.
Speaker: Guard side, there's nothing like getting fired, okay?
Speaker: It makes you very famous when you get blown out of a situation like that.
Speaker: You were nine years old when I was getting my ass fired from the White House, just so you know.
Speaker: And look at you now, look at you now.
Speaker: Yeah, I was going to say.
Speaker: So can you explain the role, though, quickly to our listeners?
Speaker: And how were you initially offered this position?
Speaker: Look, I'd known Trump for 20 years.
Speaker: I worked on the campaign.
Speaker: I was a lifelong Republican.
Speaker: I was actually with George Bush, his brother, Jeb Bush.
Speaker: He was the former governor of Florida.
Speaker: He was running for president in 2016.
Speaker: He lost the race.
Speaker: When he came out of the race, Donald Trump asked me to go work for him.
Speaker: He was the presumptive nominee.
Speaker: I went to go work for him.
Speaker: He went on to win the race.
Speaker: Um, I got close to him on the campaign.
Speaker: I traveled with him.
Speaker: I did 71 campaign stops, hundreds of hours of media advocacy.
Speaker: He won.
Speaker: He put me on the transition team.
Speaker: Uh, my wife probably hates him like almost as much as Melania hates him, which is like way up here.
Speaker: And she didn't want me to go work for him, but I didn't listen.
Speaker: Cause I, I let my pride and my ego dictate my decision-making.
Speaker: And so you guys are young.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And this is 44 years of experience above your age, right?
Speaker: I was 16 and I had tremendous amounts of energy and boldness and ambition.
Speaker: But when you get to 60, you have the same boldness and ambition, probably a little less energy.
Speaker: But truth be told, you're a little wiser.
Speaker: And so I wasn't wise enough, frankly.
Speaker: I had friends of mine that said, don't go work for them.
Speaker: It's going to be a disaster for you.
Speaker: But I grew up in a blue-collar family, and I wanted to fit a narrative.
Speaker: I wanted to be able to say, wow, I went to some good schools.
Speaker: I grew up in a blue-collar family.
Speaker: I made some money on Wall Street.
Speaker: I now got to work in the White House for the American president.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And frankly, it was a little bit too compelling.
Speaker: So I took the job.
Speaker: We were fighting in the White House.
Speaker: And 11 days later, I got fired.
Speaker: Also, I want to ask you, how is, you know, you've known Trump for a while.
Speaker: How is he like in private?
Speaker: Is he the same?
Speaker: Is he the same character?
Speaker: Is he completely different?
Speaker: Pretty similar.
Speaker: I mean, listen, I mean, he's gregarious.
Speaker: I mean, there's a reason why he has a following.
Speaker: He's a charming person in private.
Speaker: If he's berating you on Twitter, he sees you that very same day.
Speaker: He's nice to you.
Speaker: He's not going to he's a little bit of a conflict avoider.
Speaker: And so he wants people to like him.
Speaker: So there's a charm to him.
Speaker: There's a gregarious nature to him.
Speaker: But unfortunately, there's a lot of self-loathing.
Speaker: It could have been bad parenting.
Speaker: It looks like you guys are doing well.
Speaker: Hopefully your parents love you.
Speaker: I think his father used to beat the living daylights out of him and send him to some military school.
Speaker: And so he's never felt totally fulfilled.
Speaker: So there's a little bit of this black hole of need for achievement, need for self-aggrandizement.
Speaker: And he's doing this stuff more for the attention of it and more for the flex of it than for actually serving people.
Speaker: And he's very rarely I've never heard him give a speech and say, hey, I'm here to serve the people.
Speaker: I mean, he's I hate this.
Speaker: I hate that country's falling apart.
Speaker: It's all this sort of like victimhood disunifying messaging.
Speaker: It's not really about, hey, I'm here to serve the people.
Speaker: So why do you dislike him perhaps as well?
Speaker: Because obviously you were fired by him.
Speaker: Why do you dislike him now?
Speaker: Remember, you know, this gets lost in the historical analysis of everything.
Speaker: I got fired by him.
Speaker: I didn't even take it personally.
Speaker: You know, when you go into politics, you got to be ready for that sort of stuff.
Speaker: So I got fired by him.
Speaker: I took it like a man.
Speaker: I didn't blame anybody other than me.
Speaker: People ask me about it on television.
Speaker: I know I made some mistakes in the White House.
Speaker: The president fired me.
Speaker: No big deal.
Speaker: I stayed loyal to him for two years.
Speaker: People forget that, but you'd have to Google it.
Speaker: But in August of 2019, two years after he fired me, I said, you know, there's something wrong with this guy and he shouldn't really be president anymore.
Speaker: And so I drew that conclusion based on a lot of different factors.
Speaker: The liberals are mad at me.
Speaker: They said I should have drew that conclusion sooner.
Speaker: But, you know, shortly after I started saying that stuff, a lot of people fell into line against him.
Speaker: There's over 40 people.
Speaker: cabinet members that are now saying the same thing.
Speaker: So I'm not mad at him for firing me.
Speaker: People miss him.
Speaker: I've been fired before.
Speaker: I'm best friends with one of the guys.
Speaker: My first job I actually got fired from, there was a big layoffs in the recession.
Speaker: I'm like best friends with the guy that fired me.
Speaker: I never took that person.
Speaker: It's the way he acts.
Speaker: He acts nuts.
Speaker: OK, you know, you can't have a guy like that running the free world.
Speaker: You can't have a guy like that sitting on top of the world's most powerful military and arguably the most powerful economy.
Speaker: You can't have our world in the state that it's in, where over five point seven billion people are living under tyranny or autocracy and the West, whether it's the United Kingdom,
Speaker: The English speaking peoples of Australia and Canada who are beacons of hope, beacons of freedom, magnets for liberty for the rest of the people.
Speaker: You can't have a guy that I know he's ass kissing dictators.
Speaker: I mean, come on.
Speaker: You don't want a guy like that at the top of the food chain.
Speaker: It's disgusting.
Speaker: And so smart, moral people that have a good backbone, even if they supported him in the past, smart people say, you know, I made a mistake.
Speaker: I took the available information.
Speaker: I thought it was the right thing to do to support him because I was a lifelong Republican.
Speaker: But he's antithetical to what America should be about, a result of which I can't support him.
Speaker: I'm a patriot first and a partisan second.
Speaker: And trust me, there's a lot of us out there now.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: Actually, I quite like that phrase you just said there, patriot first and a partisan second.
Speaker: Also, from a UK perspective, I just found his presidency almost sort of comical and quite staggering.
Speaker: I mean, the example which comes to me first was, you know, telling people to drink bleach during COVID.
Speaker: He had that mishap with drawing using a Sharpie on the map.
Speaker: I mean, his presidency was just quite unbelievable because he had some of these sort of slip ups that were just quite hilarious.
Speaker: It's terrible.
Speaker: You know, and I, you know, what I, what I would, what I would say to you is it's a little different here.
Speaker: You know, we don't have the hereditary DNA, the hereditary memory of the Europeans of what a real human
Speaker: devastating fascist dictators can do to a society.
Speaker: You know, we we don't send our kids to the war cabinet rooms in London, the Churchill War Cabinet rooms.
Speaker: We don't send them to areas of London that were blitzed by the Nazis.
Speaker: We don't if we're in France, go to Normandy or visit battlegrounds.
Speaker: Or how about if you're in Poland visiting a concentration camp or the German people, what they've learned about their
Speaker: ancestors' actions in the Second World War.
Speaker: And so the hereditary memory of fascism and the learning involved with this sort of type of people is the reason why 75, 80 percent of the Europeans are like Trump's nuts.
Speaker: I mean, he, you know, you could be center right, but you don't want to be alt right, which is absolutely wrong.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so so in the United States, however, we've had no hereditary memory of that.
Speaker: We had no attack on our soil during that war.
Speaker: We were insulated from a Franklin Roosevelt put down the first America First movement, which was led by Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin and.
Speaker: I don't know, Huey Long.
Speaker: I could give you the names of the people that were trying to create a Nazi party in the United States, but Roosevelt was too tough.
Speaker: He was too big of a politician.
Speaker: And so he beat those guys down.
Speaker: But now we're sitting here with people that don't really understand it.
Speaker: They see Trump as a cure-all or a panacea.
Speaker: And that's what authoritarians do.
Speaker: They pick out scapegoats and they tell people,
Speaker: that they're the only people that can fix a problem.
Speaker: And then they, they go into a, uh, uh, uh, they make it easy.
Speaker: They try to make it easy.
Speaker: You know, it's that sort of thing.
Speaker: And you can't, you can't make it easy.
Speaker: You know, it's devastating.
Speaker: We've got the election in a couple of months and I just wanted to ask you, what's your prediction?
Speaker: Who do you think is going to win?
Speaker: Do you think we're going to have Trump come back for another term at the white house?
Speaker: or is Vice President Harris going to take over?
Speaker: So I think she's gonna win.
Speaker: I always thought Trump was gonna lose this election.
Speaker: And so let me give you a couple of things before we have to leave.
Speaker: 20.2 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 are no longer on the planet.
Speaker: They've died.
Speaker: Generation Xers and Zers are the biggest part of the voting electorate now.
Speaker: Generation Z, since 2016, 40 million of them are now eligible to vote.
Speaker: And so this is a major change in the American electorate.
Speaker: So Trump calling people nasty women, nasty, taking away their reproductive freedoms and then being at the National Association of Black Journalists and saying that somebody like Kamala Kamala Harris turned black.
Speaker: No, no, not a good day.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So so so the baby boomers dying and the generation Xers and Zers swelling the voting rolls are making it harder for Trump.
Speaker: I think he's going to get his ass kicked.
Speaker: And I think the Republicans are going to have a comeuppance and they need to have a comeuppance.
Speaker: And hopefully they'll reconfigure the party to make it look like the beautiful, colorful mosaic of the American people.
Speaker: Do you also think that VPs are going to have an actual impact here?
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: Well, they can only hurt.
Speaker: They can only hurt.
Speaker: I think Waltz is modestly helping her.
Speaker: And I think J.D.
Speaker: Vance is modestly hurting him.
Speaker: I think people ultimately vote for the president at this point.
Speaker: So they, I mean, JD Vance, I mean, it looks a little nuts now.
Speaker: I mean, the cross-dressing, the loving of couches.
Speaker: I mean, the guy's a little crazy.
Speaker: So he probably wasn't the best pick.
Speaker: But remember, this is something you guys need to think about.
Speaker: Trump, the bullet whiz by his ear, 72 hours later, he was making that decision.
Speaker: He was probably traumatized.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was going to say.
Speaker: And for our last question, I'd like to just ask you, you know, we're 16 now.
Speaker: You've obviously had a bit more experience than us.
Speaker: If there was one piece of advice you wish in your age, what would it be?
Speaker: You got to ask every girl you have a crush on, you got to ask out.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You can't be a coward.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I mean, if you're like, girl, if you're like boys, then you get asked at the boys, you know, don't be a coward in life.
Speaker: I mean, that's the, the ultimately when you get to be my age and you look back, you got to be like, okay, why was I thinking that?
Speaker: Why wasn't I bolder?
Speaker: Why was I more confident?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, Dijon, you know who the girls are that you like.
Speaker: OK, just go and ask them out.
Speaker: What's the worst I can say is no big deal.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: It's not going to matter.
Speaker: I was going to say as well, from a perhaps more political standpoint, what do you think is the biggest issue threatening some young people in the USA at the moment?
Speaker: Disinformation, the Internet, the disinformation, the Russians, the Chinese, they're pumping all kinds of political disinformation out there.
Speaker: I got to hop because I got somebody here, guys.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: But I appreciate you guys having me on and we'll do it again, maybe before or after the election.
Speaker: So Anthony's just had to leave to go for a meeting, but we would just like to thank him very much for coming onto the podcast today.
Speaker: He has been a truly excellent guest.
Speaker: Yeah, I fully agree with that to you, John.
Speaker: I think this is, this episode is truly eye opening for me, at least.
Speaker: I think
Speaker: To be able to have this sort of conversation with one of the leading political analysts of today is just fantastic.
Speaker: And I hope our listeners like it too.
Speaker: Before we end, I'd also like to extend another thank you to our editor and podcast manager, James, without whom all of this would probably be a lot slower.
Speaker: and it would add a lot more pressure and stress to the lives of me and John.
Speaker: So thank you, James, for helping us with this.
Speaker: And we're going to see you next week with another huge, interesting episode.
Speaker: See you later.
Speaker: Thank you, James, indeed.
Speaker: And we'd also encourage all our listeners to listen to some of our past episodes, follow the podcast and give us a five star review on all platforms.
Speaker: Also, please do get Anthony's new book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back.
Speaker: I'm sure it's going to be absolutely excellent and a great read.
Speaker: And do also listen to his podcast, The Restless Politics USA and Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci.
Speaker: Thank you for listening.
