Anthony Scaramucci:

My wife sent me this meme. It's like this woman, she's like this rich doyenne and she's serving her kids, and one of the kids says, “Mommy, how did we get rich?” And the mommy responds, “Because your father is a sociopath and he has no understanding of risk. “ And my wife is like, “You do shit that nobody would do”

Andy Coulson:

Hello and welcome to Crisis What Crisis, the podcast that explores how to navigate life's toughest moments with the people who've lived them, learned from them and come back stronger. I'm Andy Coulson, and if you've been through a crisis or just want to be better prepared for life's inevitable difficulties, these conversations are all about providing those useful, practical lessons that will help you survive, rebuild and thrive again. And if this is your first time with us, please do hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening, and please leave us a review. It really helps make sure that these conversations are shared as widely as possible.

My guest today is Anthony Scaramucci, better known as The Mooch. A man who knows what it is to survive at the sharp end of crisis. He's been celebrated, mocked, fired, rehired, invested in, betrayed and been in the room with some of the world's most powerful people, including during his notorious and notoriously brief stint working for Donald Trump.

He's founded one of Wall Street's more resilient investment firms, Skybridge Capital. He's hosted presidents and prime ministers at his SALT conferences. He's weathered scandals in politics, finance and crypto, and he's still standing, wiser, funnier and more insightful than ever.

Anthony is also now the co-host of one of the world's fastest growing political podcasts, the brilliant The Rest is Politics US, and is the author of what is essentially a resilience manual, From Wall Street to the White House and Back.

So, we're going to talk about July 2017 when Anthony became White House Communications Director and was fired just eleven days later in a blaze of media chaos and political backstabbing. We'll also discuss the collapse of FTX in 2022 after he sold a stake in his business to Sam Bankman Fried, only to watch the empire crumble in spectacular fashion. And we'll look at those moments of personal crisis that played out quietly behind the scenes away from the cameras.

Anthony is a man who owns his mistakes. He also has a rare skill to mine crisis for real meaning. To come away not just with a stronger business, but it would seem a deeper understanding of who he is and what he wants his life to be. He once said, “Crisis is a spiritual invitation. You either ignore it or you grow.”

So, if you've ever faced or want to be prepared for a setback so sharp it rattles your sense of self, then I think this episode might be one for you.

Anthony Scaramucci, welcome to Crisis What Crisis. How are you?

Anthony Scaramucci:

So, the first crisis I'm having is I'm having a bad hair day, and I know you've got a lot of video viewers. So, when you're having a bad hair day like I am right now, because I came into my house and nothing's working in the house, I didn't get a chance to gussy up for you, Andy. But the number one thing you do when you're having a bad hair day is you own the bad hair day.

But you know the good news about my hair? I have it. I'm 61 years old, and it's still on the top of my head. So again, you know, you've got to look at the glass always half full.

Andy Coulson:

I was about to say Anthony, you’ve got nothing to complain about on the hair front.

Anthony Scaramucci:

And that's where we are right now. The hair is not working its way, I don't have the right gel, I don't have the right matte going, but I'm all right today.

So, you’ve got a very popular podcast for a reason, because it's very hard to face the music. When you're having a bad day, you're having a crisis, you get fired, you have a setback in your business, a family setback, it's very hard to face the music.

And by the way, facing the music requires you to own your human fallibility and your human frailty, and so I think that's where it is. So, what you left out of your very glowing introduction, which I'm grateful for, is that I avoided a divorce coming out of the White House. My wife had filed on- I just want you to imagine the trifecta.

I missed the birth of my son, I was with Donald Trump at the Boy Scouts convention, if you can believe this, in West Virginia. He was born on the 24th of July during my short eleven-day tenure. And there was a no-fly zone around Air Force One, so I couldn't get home. That was number one. Number two, she had filed for divorce on me already because we were already fighting about that and other reasons. And then the third thing is I got fired unceremoniously.

So, it was a rough week, Andy Coulson, it was a rough week.

Andy Coulson:

Did you go to that particular moment because it's sort of brightest in your mind because of its, you know, very obvious, very personal nature? Is that the one really when you think about- and we want to, you know, we want to talk through them today, that's the one that carried the- that you found yourself carrying the heaviest weight with?

Anthony Scaramucci:

Well, no, I wouldn’t say that- it’s a great question, probably is the short answer, but I went to that moment because conjoined to the other moments, it makes it exponentially worse. It's one thing to get fired from the White House, that in itself is a crisis. But if you're getting fired from the White House, miss the birth of your son, you love your wife and you’ve got a divorce proceeding going on, that would be an exponential layer to the crisis. I think it's important for people to understand, because when I listen to your show, what makes your show work is that you're authentic and you're finding authentic guests to talk to you about the real world, not sugarcoating it.

I could paint a nice picture of myself. You gave me a nice introduction, I could say I went to Tufts and Harvard Law School and built businesses, and I did this, and I did that, and I wrote books. And all of a sudden you look at it from 50 meters, it looks great. But when you get up close and personal, I've got a little bit of attention deficit disorder. My wife could be talking to me, “Look at me,” I'm staring at my phone, I'm not paying attention to her because I'm worried about business, I'm not in the moment, and so forth.

And so, you then have to make a reckoning. Are you going to get yourself in the moment? Are you going to dial into whatever elements of your authentic self really is, and then can you improve yourself? Can you get up in the morning and improve yourself? So, can you be less ADHD? Could you be less focused on the digital and more focused on the present? Can you acknowledge mistakes that you made in your marriage and offer up an apology and offer up a renewal? Can you own the mistakes that you made in the White House?

I got fired from the White House; the President didn't want me to work there anymore. That's fine. He's the President, I'm not. You serve at his leisure. Whatever the reasons were, he fired me, they were his reasons, I don't blame him for firing me. And you’ve got to put your big boy pants on; you can't be the victim in life.

There's a lot of things about our lives that I don't like, but those are the tribulations of life, it’s part of the human condition. I mean, the world is an is-based world, it's not a should-based world or an ought-based world. When I talk to people, Andy, I mean, I should be six foot four but I'm not, I'm five foot eight. Actually, I'm not even five foot eight. I'm only five foot eight on my license. I mean, I'm probably closer to five foot seven, you know what I mean?

But the point I'm making is, you know, you’ve got to deal with the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be, not the way you think it should be or the way it ought to be. And when you get there, then you find yourself without pity, particularly self-pity. I mean, you get there, you find yourself with, “Okay, what am I doing wrong? Can I correct it? And if I can't correct it, why can't I correct it?”

Andy Coulson:

Anthony, I want to jump forward to the end, legacy. We talk a lot on this podcast about failure, with politicians, business leaders, others. I've talked a lot about my own failures. And a lot of those guests, the sort of common thread if you like, is that you should hold to the view, I certainly do, that you must remember your failures, right? You've touched on this already, I think. That you can't bury them. You have to carry them with you because, you know, that's what it is to improve, to evolve the human condition, as you say.

But you go further. You say that you also want to be remembered for the way that you managed your failures, more than you do the successes. That's the legacy you want. Tell us tell us why that is.

Anthony Scaramucci:

I think that's important. Well first of all, I'm also self-aware enough to know that no one's ever going to remember me. My kids will, if I'm lucky enough to have grandchildren they might. By the time you get three or four generations away, I'll just be another character. We know King Tut, he was a minor prince, minor king, but we know him because we opened up a cave where his remnants were untouched for millennia. There were very powerful people in Egypt, we don't even know who the hell they were, and ten thousand years from now very few of us are going to be remembered. So, it's not a legacy that way.

I guess what it really is for me is, I have five children, and I think actions always speak louder than words. I hang out with a lot of very wealthy people Andy, and I find that they have a tendency to whitewash their lives. They get out the filter, and all of a sudden look at me. They're going up and to the right, they've made no mistakes. I've read these billionaire biographies, I'm like, “Oh wow, the guy was making the right decision in third grade, and he made the right decision in college, and he made the right decision here and there.” And then I look at their kids. Their kids are overshadowed by this sanitisation process, where the billionaire or the rich guy or whoever it may be who is telling the person how great they are, where in fact they had to have made some mistakes. They had to have gotten some luck; they had to have gotten some benefit of their industry and hard work. But it's a blend of everything.

So, I feel- I have five kids, I owe it to my kids to share with them my mistakes. I owe it to them to share with them that to grow up, we say middle class, I guess that's rich in the UK. I didn't realise that. So, if I say working class, it's probably more apropos to where I was.

My dad was a worker, he was an hourly worker, we lived in a small house, but it was fun. We had a nice way to grow up. We weren't in want for everything; I wouldn't dishonour him by telling you that. But to go from that environment-

I just had breakfast this morning with one of my mentors. I'm 61, he's 75 years old. I just met him for breakfast, and I was like, “I really owe you a debt of gratitude.” When I didn't know anything, I was wearing a polyester suit, I didn't know how to work inside a corporate office building. My dad had what we called a greenie; he wore a green uniform. It started cleaning in the morning, it had grease on it by 3.30 in the afternoon, he put it in one of those drums, they cleaned it for him, he had another green uniform the next day.

I was in a suit, an ill-fitted polyester suit I might add, but it was a suit. I didn't know my way around Goldman Sachs, and I had a sherpa taking me through. And so, the anxiety, the rite of passage to get to where I am, there was a lot of exogenous, abnormal risk-taking. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth, and just do this and do that, and you'll have a great life.

Andy Coulson:

The sherpa is the guy that you had breakfast with this morning?

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes, the sherpa was the guy I had breakfast with.

Andy Coulson:

So, he has remained a kind of mentor.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes, and a very close friend. He’s retired now-

Andy Coulson:

Which tells its own story.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes. Well, the point I'm making is I expressed my gratitude to him this morning for taking somebody that had a reasonably high IQ, that could understand what was going on but never lived in it. My dad couldn't give me any advice. I couldn't call my father and say, “Hey, there's political intrigue here at Goldman Sachs, Dad. What do you think I should do?” After he took seventeen puffs of his cigarette, he would turn to me, “Whatever you think is right. I don't know. How could I tell you?” Do you see what I mean?

Andy Coulson:

Yes.

Anthony Scaramucci:

So, you got to go from there to where I am today. You've got to take risk. You start a business; you got to take risk. You want to go into politics; you got to take risk. You want to put yourself out there on television, you could make a gaff, you got to take risks. And so, it would be impossible to take the level of risk that I have taken in my life without getting kicked in the pants more than once. In fact, many times. And so, my message is, and the legacy issue that you're bringing up, is I want my kids to know that they have space to fail. I want my kids to explore, do the things that they want to do. I don't want them to have this shadow cast upon them because I've had some measure of success. Because I see it in my buddies, Andy. I see what they do to their kids, and I don't agree with it. It's too inauthentic.

Andy Coulson:

How would you characterise your relationship with risk right now?

Anthony Scaramucci:

Andy Coulson:

Yes.

Anthony Scaramucci:

I went on the American version; Jason and I have become very close friends. They put me in a car; they were trying to drown me in the car. They set me on fire, made me run out of a house. They dropped me out of a- I had to back dive out of a helicopter. At that time, I was 58 years old. My wife was just saying, “Why the hell are you doing this?” I'm doing this, number one because I want to see if I can do it. I'm doing this because it'll open up an aperture for me of things that go on in the military that I wouldn't know had I not done it.

And so yes, my relationship with risk is that I don't understand it. I'm willing to take what is perceived by others to be irrational risk because I recognise the fleeting nature of life. Maybe I've read Meditations too many times. What Aurelius says in the book, we're here for this moment, we're going to die, relax into your life. You're not going to change the program. The program is you come in, if you're lucky you get a good brain and a reasonably good body if you're lucky, if you're blessed by Fortuna, you get that. And then you're going to have the tribulations of life. One part tragedy, one part comedy, and one part stuff that you're doing, which may infect your life, and one part luck.

You know, there was a guy- I tell this story to young kids when I'm in these colleges. I walk into the interview, I am wearing a polyester suit, am wearing a polyester tie, I'm wearing a polyester shirt. I am fully-

Andy Coulson:

Quite a serious fire risk, is what you are.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes, I am a fully flammable person. Yes, I'm ready at any moment, they strike and imagine a whole thing could catch on fire. And I'm sitting there and I'm talking about the TED spread and I'm talking about the Eurodollar, the Petrodollar. And I've read the Wall Street Journal, and they had a white board, they said, “Okay, do a present value analysis of this,” and I did it. I could do the math in my head.

And then the guy looks at me, he says, “Okay, listen. You're a very smart kid; you're here at Harvard. You're the worst dressed person that we have ever met.” I mean, I look like a young Italian undertaker from Brooklyn. And he said, “You gotta go and buy yourself some natural fibre clothing. You gotta go to Brooks Brothers or Jay Press. I can't bring you down to Goldman Sachs looking like this. By the way, the Tony Monero Saturday Night Fever hairstyle, that's not gonna work at Goldman Sachs, okay? Go to this barber, tell him you want to cut your hair in a corporate look, and get yourself a suit before you show up at Goldman.”

And I tell that story because I didn't know it. I remember calling my mother, my mother's like, “That guy doesn't know what he's talking about, you look fantastic.” You know how mothers are. I'm like, “Ma, I don't think I look that fantastic. I think I look like an Italian undertaker from Brooklyn. So, we’ve got to work on this, right?”

I tell that story for a reason, because you have to go through this. You want to move classes, you want to try to have an aspirational life in America, and you're starting from one place, you know?

Andy, a core memory in my life is March of 1972. I was 8 years old; this is a core memory in my life. I walked into that tiny house that we lived in, I came home from school, I could walk home from school, and my grandmother and my mother were ecstatic. And I just remember- because you remember how people feel, I’m like, “Why are these people so happy?” And they were just so happy, and I'm like, “What happened today?” And they had a washer and dryer delivered, and they had a plumber install the washer and dryer in the basement.

And so, my mom and my grandmother no longer had to carry the clothes to Main Street in the town with those- you remember those paper wooden corded plastic bags or paper bags? My grandmother used to always have these deep creases in her hands from carrying the laundry to Main Street. And now, they had a washer and dryer in the house. And it was like a second coming, it was like a resurrection or something. They could not have been happier.

Again, I bring that story up for a reason, because we're moving. We're moving from my grandparents being peasant farmers in Italy, to my grandfather, my great-grandparents I should say, my grandfather being a mechanic in New York, to my grandmother being a maid, frankly, my father being a crane operator, and we're moving. We're moving. We're moving. And when you're moving, you got to take risk. And if you're moving and you want to have a big life, you're going to get beat up.

Andy Coulson:

Except that when those risks go wrong, as it did for you with FTX, with Sam Bankman-Fried, and when I look at the various sort of tribulations that you've punched your way through, that's the one that causes me to think- because you know my story, you know some of the stuff that I handled. Of your difficulties, that's the one that perhaps nudges closest to the one that I perhaps have a little bit of experience of. Because I know that the FBI are involved, the Department of Justice are involved, you don't know where this thing is going. It must have been pretty scary for you and your family. You know that impact on the personal that you touched on right at the start of our conversation. The levels of stress must have been appalling.

Now, for a lot of people, that would have caused them to- having got through it as you did, and I'd like you just to tell us how you did in a moment, but having got through it, a lot of people's kind of conclusion of that would be, “Oh thank God, and I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to go anywhere near that kind of risk again. I'm not going to put myself in those kinds of rooms again, I'm not going to be dealing with people like him again.”

But what you're telling me I think is that the risk dial, although I'm sure slightly moderated, is still very much central to your sort of dashboard.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes, yes. Well, I mean, so that particular situation is a heartbreaking one. The White House situation different. You go into politics; you're going to get fired. You're going to have a start date, you're going to have an end date, it's going to be bruising. I can't speak for British football but let me talk about American football for a second. You know, the one we play with the oblong ball, okay? If you are in the NFL, you're guaranteed to have a concussion. So let me just state that again for your podcast listeners. Join the NFL, put the helmet on in the uniform, you're going to get- even the place kicker and the punter will likely end up with a concussion at some point in their career.

And so that's like politics. If you're going to put the uniform on and go work in presidential politics, you're going to get a political concussion. So, you can either be a cry-baby about that, or you can say, “Oh, I got my political concussion. Let's move on.”

The Sam thing is different, because the Sam thing is about betrayal, and the Sam thing is about trust. And the Sam thing is about a young guy, I'm probably old enough to be Sam's dad. He's this brilliant figure, arguably a fantastic investor, because I can talk about the bankruptcy estate in a minute, everyone's getting their money back as a result of his skill as an investor. And he's this brilliant guy, and he seems very well meaning and very well intended. He's got some personality idiosyncrasies, which a lot of these billionaire founders do. But he's amoral and he's lying. He's lying straight to my face about certain things, and he's lying straight to my colleague’s face about other things.

And so now I want you to imagine this. I sell a piece of my business. I go on CNBC, the American business channel, it's also in Europe, and I announce the partial sale of my business to Sam. We're on the TV together, I'm going to help him grow his business. Eight short weeks later, I go from the hero of that announcement to back on CNBC where I have to tell people that I think he has committed fraud. And we'll give him the benefit of the doubt because you're innocent until proven guilty. But you know, this looks like a very bad situation. And unfortunately, for me, people turned on me. So, there were people that said okay, I have to be criminally involved with this. And so, they turned on me.

And again, another big lesson for your kids. If you live with integrity, you're always going to have opportunity. So, you mentioned the SEC, it was the SEC, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Southern District. It was the IRS. I gave my phones, my WhatsApp, my Signal, my emails, my personal stuff, everything. “Here are my phones. You guys take the phones, download everything you want, you can look through every email, every conversation I had with Sam and the employees and partners of FTX.”

And then I had to sit in the summer of 2023, which is basically- two short years ago, sir, I had to sit in the summer of 2023, for four and a half hours of testimony, in this dingy governmental office downtown Manhattan, where I had every one of those entities there, 36 people. It was me, and my attorney, and I took four and a half hours of questions from the people in that room, under oath.

And so, I left the room, I turned to my attorney, and my attorney said something to me, he's a bit of an asshole, I was ready to choke him, he said something to me. He says, “You know, you better never do something wrong.” I said, “Why is that?” He goes, “You’ve got such a big fucking mouth. I mean, you told them every little detail of everything. You're not the type of person that could do anything wrong, because you're just gonna blab out what you did.”

And I looked at him, I said, “Well, that's why I'm never going to do anything wrong.” Because you got to remember something. I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but my dad used to always say to us, “We pay our bills, we pay our taxes, we get a parking ticket, we pay the parking ticket.” And I tell the staff at Skybridge, “Hey, we never do anything wrong. We don't need the money.”

I'm never going to dishonour my father, who worked like that for 41 years in hot and cold weather outside to provide for his family. I don't need the money. We're not going to disgrace my dad's name. So yes, betrayal, you could say I had bad judgment, you could say I should have caught him. But remember, there were 25 other brilliant venture capital investments that gave him the money. My old boss, the CEO of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, he called me and said, “Don't feel so bad about it. You got the money from him, you didn't give him the money, he gave you the money.” But I did feel bad about it, and it was a bad time.

And then there were several financial obituaries written about me and Sky Bridge, they said I was going to go out of business. I think the New York Post, the tabloid, had me sinking in this little dingy, loaded with Bitcoin, because Bitcoin went from 70,000 to 22,000, and there I was sinking in the boat. And people were like, “Okay, the guy's going to go out of business.” Television appearances were cancelled. I had television appearances cancelled. I said, “Okay, people don't believe in me anymore, that’s fine.”

And then lo and behold, the situation unfolded and then people were like, “Oh, he didn't do anything wrong. And oh, by the way, he's pretty much right about the Bitcoin situation.” This is YouTube as well, right? You probably can't- can you see that?

Andy Coulson:

Yes.

Anthony Scaramucci:

That's me sinking in the Bitcoin boat. You see that?

Andy Coulson:

Got it.

Anthony Scaramucci:

So, we got a bunch of comedians at Sky Bridge that made like a bobblehead of that. They took a big 26 by 13 frames, and they put that in my office. That's me sinking, okay? And so, you can either laugh at yourself and roll with it, or you can be a cry-baby about it. I’m not going to be a cry-baby about it. But here's the thing. In that crisis, because this show is about how do you get yourself out of these things. In that crisis I had three things guiding me.

Number one, live with integrity. Not going to be the richest person on Wall Street, don't care, but we're going to do everything right inside this organisation. The organisation made it to twenty years for a reason. No compliance snafus, God bless us.

Number two, face the music. I don't run and hide. When I got fired from the White House, I had this crisis manager that told me to go to buy a house in Tuscany, Andy. Go buy a house in Tuscany, wait in Tuscany for five years, then come back. I'm not doing that; I'm going to go on Steve Colbert tonight. I'm not doing that. So, you got to face the music.

And then the third thing is how about having a sense of humour? How about having some self-reflection, but also having a sense of humour about yourself? You know, I was at the Chalke History Festival- and my demo by the way with these women, it's fantastic. My demo is like 75 to 95, okay? If you are 75 to 95 and you're a Brit, I think I'm going to do very well. My wife laughs. She's like, “That's your demo.” But we got this like 75-year-old British woman, lovely woman, and she's like, “How did you get through all this stuff?” I said, “Hun, I barely made the height requirement for my rollercoaster of life. Barely made it. Any shorter, I probably wouldn't have gotten on the coaster.”

the point I'm making is, what are you going to do? Are you going to pretend it didn't happen? Or are you going to- I watch certain politicians, they make a mistake, and then they're like, “Oh you know, it's Andy Colson's fault, Anthony Scaramucci's fault, it’s this and that.” It's like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz; they’re pointing in ten different directions. And then the people are looking at them saying, “Well, that’s not- I don't want to be with that guy.”

Andy Coulson:

What about the bitterness? You mentioned there betrayal, and people running away from the gunfire. How did you process that?

Anthony Scaramucci:

My wife is really bad at that, by the way. My wife has a mental note in her head, “Well, that guy didn't believe you, I got no time for him, and that guy didn't believe you, I got no time for him.”

Andy Coulson:

She keeps the list.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes, she's more Italian with the vendettas, you know? Do you know what Italian Alzheimer's, Andy Coulson? Do you know what Italian Alzheimer's is? We forget everything but the grudges. Have you ever heard that? That's Italian Alzheimer's, okay? So that's for my wife's category, right? But I don't. My attitude is, I get it, let's move on. I'm not really a grudge holder.

My feeling is that- this is a great line, and I think about this line often, it's one of the lines from my grandmother. The best among us choose not to judge human frailty so harshly. But what my grandmother was really trying to say, it's your own human frailty. It's not Andy Coulson's human frailty. Sure, be forgiving of him, but what about yourself? Stop pretending that you're not human and that you're not frail or you're not going to make mistakes, and rather than begrudge those mistakes, forgive yourself.

I don't wake up in the morning and say, “What a disaster at the White House. Let me kick myself in the pants this morning, I did such a stupid thing and got myself fired.” I take the millstone of regret, and I put it beside me, and I go forward. And okay, that happened yes, that happened yes, that was a bad idea, yes, but-

Andy Coulson:

How long do you stay in that moment of analysing, yes that happened. You're making it sound as though that is a kind of instant process for you. Do you allow yourself to swim around in those waters a bit, ever?

Anthony Scaramucci:

I would not say that it's an instant process, no. If it's coming across that way forgive me, because it's not meant to come across that way. I was down after the White House firing. I was introspective, I was hurt, that was very painful sir. Okay, I'm not here trying to brush it off, it's eight years later. But that was astonishingly painful, and it was also- a lot of pain came from the mischaracterisation. I just did Lionel Barber's podcast, I don't know if you know who Lionel is, he’s a former FT editor.

Andy Coulson:

I do yes, we’ve met.

Anthony Scaramucci:

I think Lionel had an opinion of me in 2017 that he doesn't have in 2025, and I think that opinion was shaped by the mischaracterisation and the ad hominem attacks. And when you go into Washington like that, I got caricatured and I got two-dimensionalised. And so, I'm like okay wow, I just got flattened literally flattened and I'm now a caricature, but that's really not me. You could be bitter about that. Okay, I don't remember being bitter about that, I remember being sad about it and I remember being, “Okay wow, that is a huge problem. I wish that didn't happen.” But it happened, and so what do you do? You got to go forward. You got to get up in the morning and go forward.

And it's eight years later, I'm sure there's still people that have that feeling about me, and they're entitled to whatever they want to feel. But I feel like- I feel like I've had the opportunity. I think the weird thing about that firing, Andy, I had the opportunity to create a platform of awareness where I can then speak my truth or at least my version of the truth, and I can have a conversation with you or others on my own podcast, or people in general.

But I don't . You know, I did take some measures after the FDX debacle which has strengthened my business. It's made our business more risk tolerant, meaning if something else happens we're more- have like a fire safety shield around the business.

And I think my political debacle, my political kerfuffle, has probably also given me a lot more experience about how these things work so that I can- I can speak to people about again- and remember, I didn't only work for Trump for eleven days, I was with trump for thirteen months.

Andy Coulson:

Of course. It’s characterised as a moment, but it’s much, much more than a moment. Just one more question on the bitterness if I may before we move on. I think I'm right in saying that you said that at some stage further down the road you will visit Sam Bankman-Fried in prison. What will you say to him?

Anthony Scaramucci:

I have a soft spot for the guy. I have a soft spot for the guy. He's got 25 years; he’s a young man. The money has been returned. The money was mislabelled, and he did some fraudulent things, and if I were closer to Sam, which I wasn't, I would have said, “Plead guilty. You did some really bad things, plead guilty. You'll get ten years. You're 30 years old, you'll come out at 40 and there'll be a process of reform,” as there has been for people like Michael Milken and other people that have committed crimes. He wasn't Bernie Madoff, where he just made off with the money. He did some things that were mislabelling, he did some things that were unethical, he committed fraud and so he's got to pay the piper.

But by not making it the plea, and he got the full conviction, and then he got a very punitive 25-year sentence, I feel bad about that for him. Again, he hurt me, hurt my reputation, but I do have a soft spot for him.

Somebody asked me if I would visit him in prison and I said, “Perhaps at some point I will.” I would probably want a couple of more years ago by, you know, this is still fresh. This is two years ago. But if you told me, it's three, four, five years down the road, would I potentially go visit him in prison, I probably would.

Andy Coulson:

I love the fact that you're saying, and being frank, that right now I'm not ready. Further down the road, maybe. You’re acknowledging that you know what happens with the passage of time. By the way, it might not as well, right? It might be that you learn something else about the case. It might be that something else pops up and you think, “Actually I never want to see the guy.”

But the mere fact that having what happened, happened, and for you to now say there's a possibility, maybe, maybe, it's an incredible thing. Because I think it's a fantastic lesson in how to handle and get through the truly difficult- I mean, it's stoic I suppose, and I know that Marcus Aurelius earlier.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes, I’m a big – if you read From Wall Street to the White House and Back, it's 25 lessons. It's not chapters. I've read a lot about General Aurelius, I've read his work many times, also some of the other writers like Homer, both the Elite and the Odyssey. And there's a passage, there's an arc, there's a journey. How are you going to handle yourself over the journey, and then what are some of the tenets of the way you're going to think about things?

And so, two things for people that listen to your podcasts that I would say, no bitterness to the extent that you can, it's human to be bitter. No self-pity, it's human to have self-pity. And no wanton regret. By the way, that's also human, to have all three of those things.

And again, I'm not sitting here pedantically telling you or sanctimoniously telling you I haven't felt those things, of course I have felt those things. But how do you work through those things? How do you do something transcendental? How do you make a transformation? Because if you can do that, if you can make that transformation, you can relax.

Because the battle Andy, for people like you and me, and for many of your listeners, the battle is in between our ears and it's behind our eyes. I can look at somebody and say, “Oh, that guy's wealthier than me, and I think I'm smarter than him, let me begrudge him.” Or I could look at him and say, “Oh, that guy's wealthier than me, he may or may not be smarter than me but let me celebrate him.”

Like I tell my kids, I can only give you two things. Number one, celebrate the successes of your friends. Because if you do that, you're always going to have friends. You want to be the first call. Andy Coulson wins the lottery, call me. We'll go have a bottle of Krug somewhere together, okay? We'll celebrate the success. Don't be a begrudger, celebrate the successes of your friends.

The other thing, you're going to be here for a minute. I was 31 years old five minutes ago. I'm now 61 years old. It's going to boom; you're going to be there. What are you going to do? You're going to cry about it? No, you're going to say, “You know what? I'm going for it.” What do you want to go for? “I want to have my own business. I want to build a business, maybe get into the media somehow. That's what I want to do.” So go do it.

The battle, Andy, is in between your ears and behind your eyes. And Henry Ford said it better than me, so let me say what he said. “If you think you can do it, or you can't do it, you're right.” That’s the battle.

Andy Coulson:

Exactly right. Can we talk about cancellation? There's one theory with where we are on black and white judgments, the speed at which judgment comes these days, that it's perhaps harder than ever to come back. Your story suggests perhaps that's not the case. Where are you on cancellation and how those who find themselves in any version of it, how they should approach it?

Anthony Scaramucci:

I think it's so interesting, because when I got fired from the White House some people wanted to cancel me. There are still some hard left people that I'm dead to those people. I am permanently cancelled in their mind. I think if you do really bad things, I can understand how the society can shun you. If you're locking women in your room, in your office, and you have superior authority over them, and they're young women, I think that's a crime. I think we have to be- that's a different category than being fired from the White House.

But I guess what I would say to you, that our harshness is hurting the society. Because it's not providing enough space for the mistakes, and it's also not providing enough space for the comedy. I told somebody on the Harris campaign, I said, “This is not going to be right until they can remake Tropic Thunder. It's not going to be right until they can remake Old School.” Meaning, we had comedies at the turn of the century in 2010, 2015, that were really funny comedies. They made fun of stereotypes, they made fun of mannerisms, sexuality, whatever it was. And by the way, I find it funny, I don't take it that seriously.

But now we're in this scolding society, where you do certain things or you say certain things, you're finished. I think it's dangerous. I think you'll lose a lot of talent from that, but I think you'll also mute a lot of creativity. And so yes, I'm not a big fan of the cancel stuff. But having said that, I do think that if there are aggressive transgressions that take place, sure, there has to be some recompense for that. You can't just willy-nilly. But I think we've gone overboard with that. That's my personal opinion.

Andy Coulson:

On reputation, around which we're having a conversation here, at least in part, people often- and I'm sort of involved in that world from a professional point of view. People in business, people I think more broadly than that, look to politics for example in regard to reputation. Is that being that one of the sort of core risks with Trump, that people see his success, twice, and the approach that he's taken to get there, and think, “Well that's how I should behave. That’s exactly what I need to do to succeed.” Is that the biggest danger that we have from his success?

Anthony Scaramucci:

There are other dangers, but I think that is a big danger. Because I think what happens is we live in a mimetic, and I'm probably not pronouncing it with the right English accent, but it's M-I-M-E-T-I-C, mimetic society, where we're miming each other. And so, we look to people who are successful, and we say, “Okay, how did that person be successful?” Or we look at status, totems of success. That person drives a Rolls-Royce, I'm successful, let me go drive a Rolls-Royce. So, we have a mimetic society. So, when someone's acting abhorrently like Donald Trump, but getting results, and people say, “Okay, well, that gives me license to act that way, or that gives me license for this meanness or this cruelty.”

Or said differently like the old-school Italians, the fish stinks from the head down. You're looking at leadership, and the leadership is guiding you, and obviously the country, your country, my country, most countries do better when people intuit from their leaders that they're moral. It's not saying that they're infallible, it's not saying they're not going to make a bad decision here or there, but they're trying to make the right decision. And you're getting a feeling from the ethos of the leader that they're trying to serve the people, that they're looking for policies that are going to make people's lives better, safer, the air cleaner, the street cleaner, feeling safer from a lack of crime, or feeling safer from a national security perspective, where they're not under threat, and they can live under some level of freedom.

But when you're looking at our government right now, our government is about cruelty, our government is about self-service, there's some level of grift going on in our government, and I think it could turn people sour but it could also encourage people that could be malevolently influenced by that behaviour.

Andy Coulson:

Who are your reputational role models?

Anthony Scaramucci:

Well again, there are people like the gentleman I just had breakfast with. I would say my dad is a reputational role model in terms of his work ethic and his integrity. He was a tough guy, he used to- we used to get hit a lot, Andy. I don't know how old you are, I’m probably older than you, but in an Italian American blue-collar family you're getting smacked around, okay? Your grandmother hit you with the wooden spoon, your father hit you with the belt, and your mother, she bit her finger, and she directed one of the two of them to hit you. My mother didn't realise, she was more like the air traffic controller of corporal punishment, do you know what I mean?

But he was a good guy, and he had very high integrity. If you're talking about somebody from literature or somebody from leadership, I think Lincoln was probably the most complex. I have a book, it's not here in this house, but my home, my non-summer home, I have a book called Life and Liberty, and it's the actual writings of Lincoln. So, it could include a diary passage, or a speech that he wrote, or a speech that he rendered, or something, campaign platform. And I look through it I would say weekly. I go through the book, I thumb through it, because in it is a very clear-eyed, clear view of moral consequence.

I have a prayer in my other office that was rendered by Franklin Roosevelt, and it's the D-Day Prayer. He said a prayer on the evening of the invasion, and he had this embossed, he had it lettered like the King James Bible, and he made fifty of these. I've bought two of them at auction. And if you read it, they're measured words. I'm still a practicing Catholic, I know there's a lot of secularities in Europe now and so forth, but I find that whether it was Truman or Roosevelt or Lincoln, they mention God a lot. And if you're an atheist you can say it's a moral compass about what to do, what are the right things to do, and I think that's it. I can't tell you I've always done the right thing, I'm not saying that I've made a lot of mistakes, and I've made a lot of mistakes personally, professionally, and otherwise. The goal is to try to, and I think that's what I look toward.

Andy Coulson:

What about someone contemporary now in sort of public life? Maybe someone you've been in the room with, maybe someone you work with. From all of the arenas in which you've sort of operated, can you remember-

Anthony Scaramucci:

In contemporary life, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, those would to be two American political figures that I know very well. I worked very closely on that campaign. I'm personal friends with both of them, really were trying to do the right thing. And in Paul's case, when it became impossible to work with Donald Trump, he would have had to have switched who he was. Kevin McCarthy was willing to do that; Mike Johnson's willing to do that. Paul Ryan wasn't willing to do that, so he resigned. Those are guys that I look to that I say they've got pretty good moral compasses. Again, those are political leaders.

I would say in business, my old boss, Lloyd Blankfein, was really trying to do the right thing, I had a lot of respect for him. I would say that as an entrepreneur, the people that I relate to the most are the Charlie Mungers, the Warren Buffets. Again, people think of them as investors, but they really were entrepreneurs. They thought about how to build a business, how to sustain a business, how to think about people. And I think they both took an approach which I like. They didn't make their lives about being zero sum. They made their lives about, okay, there's a big, big blue ocean, many fish in the sea, one plus one could equal five. We don't have to have a zero-sum game. Those are some of the people that I would look to.

Andy Coulson:

We're running out of time. You've been very generous with your-

Anthony Scaramucci:

Thank you for bringing me on.

Andy Coulson:

I really appreciate it.

Anthony Scaramucci:

I'm sorry we got here late, and I'm sorry I don't have my hair paste in. I'm a little- I had a fix this year.

Andy Coulson:

You've just got to let that go Anthony, just let it go

Anthony Scaramucci:

Vanity could be one of my big weaknesses, Coulson. Vanity is one of my big weaknesses. As I tell Katty Kay, vain and pain rhyme for a reason. Have you ever been stabbed in the forehead with a Botox needle? You don't know what real pain is until you get a syringe into your forehead.

Andy Coulson:

You’re being very authentic about it though, very authentic. We've skimmed the surface of the various challenges that you’ve faced, but if I were to ask you, you can go back to one of them, right? Not to change it, but to feel it again and learn even more from it, which one would you- knowing that you're going to get through it, which one would you go back to?

Anthony Scaramucci:

It's a great question. I'm going to say the White House one. I would say that the weird thing is, the Sam one was more painful from a business perspective and from a betrayal. The White House one was actually more circumstantial. I was caught in the wrong place, the wrong time, said a few of the wrong things, and I got ejected from the James Bond car driving at 50 miles an hour. But I probably would want to slow motion that, and I would probably want to observe it a little bit more carefully. It was so traumatising that I probably wasn't as observant of the actual fiasco as much as I was trying to climb out of it, so I think that would be one.

The Sam one I would probably want to avoid, because weirdly Andy, that was probably more painful. The White House one was like, all right yes, I can see how that could happen, and then I would probably want to observe everything around me.

Listen, my wife and I, and I said this at the Chalke History Fest, I'll share it briefly. My wife and I were almost divorced. We love each other, we've got two beautiful kids here at home. I think it would have been a tragedy for all of us. And I think the big lesson there, I certainly wouldn't want to go through that one again, but I'm saying it to you in this way. Don't make your relationships disposable. We have a tendency to cut people off, that's the cancellation thing. We have a tendency to be very binary on people. I mean, relax. There's a grey zone for most people. I love my wife, she loves me, we fixed our marriage. Is it perfect? Is our marriage perfect? Well, you know my marriage isn't perfect. Are you married?

Andy Coulson:

I am.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Okay, so you know what marriage is. Tell me the person who has a perfect marriage, I'll point out the liar in the room.

Andy Coulson:

Absolutely.

Anthony Scaramucci:

But we love each other.

Andy Coulson:

And I think I'm probably as grateful in that regard perhaps as you are.

Anthony Scaramucci:

Yes. But we love each other, and we fixed it, you know what I mean? And we're doing better than ever before. But the point is, imagine if we broke it off, it would have been worse for me. I'd like to think it would be worse for her, or maybe not. Maybe she'd be with like Jeff Bezos, I don't know. But I'm saying you know, I think it would be worse for my kids, but here we are.

Andy Coulson:

Yes, wonderful. Anthony Scaramucci, thanks so much for joining us.

Anthony Scaramucci:

God bless you, man