Anthony Scaramucci: Eleven Days in the White House, FTX Collapse and Facing Failure

Spooning with Mark Wogan

Anthony Scaramucci joins Mark Wogan to reflect on his turbulent career, ranging from his working-class Long Island roots to his eleven days

Key takeaways

• Scaramucci describes his decision to join the Trump administration as an 'ego-based' and 'pride-based' mistake.
• The FTX collapse was more personally devastating than his White House exit because it struck at the core of his 20-year business.

Main topics

• White House tenure
• FTX collapse and fraud

Notable quotes

It was an ego-based decision. It was a pride-based decision.

Conclusion

A raw and honest exploration of how to navigate extreme professional v

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) U.S. voters abroad, have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click Request My Ballot. Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Speaker 4 (0:38) Hello and welcome to Spooning with Mark Wogan. We are here in my restaurant, Home Sliced Pizza, in London's fair city. But who is my very special guest today, who will be trying the food that Speaker 2 (0:47) they think they love and the food that they think they hate, whilst, of course, wearing a Speaker 4 (0:51) blindfold? My guest this week had one of the shortest jobs in history, 11 days. Is that a clue? Who could it be? He is a financier, but he's also an author and broadcaster. Now, he's had... eight books and he's here to talk about his ninth. All the wrong moves. Will you please welcome The Mooch or as I like to call him Anthony Scaramucci. Speaker 4 (1:21) How are you, man? It's great to be here. It's great to have you here. Love the vibe. Speaker 3 (1:25) I love the smell of this restaurant. Speaker 4 (1:26) Now, listen, I want to go right back to the beginning with you because you are the epitome of the self-made man. You grew up American, Italian, New York, working class, Long Island family. Dad was a crane operator, but originally worked in the sand mines, which is a horrific job, right? Well, Speaker 3 (1:43) better than the coal mines, you know, because sand is outside. He started as a laborer. He stayed in that sand mine for 41 years, but he became the crane operator. So you hoist the sand, you put it in what's called a cleaner. We get all the gravel out of it, and then you put it on a conveyor belt. And they used to put it out on barges near my hometown, and they'd ship it over to Long Speaker 4 (2:03) Island City. Speaker 3 (2:03) But I get a Speaker 4 (2:04) sense reading about you and him that... You looked at that and went, there's no way I'm doing that. Speaker 3 (2:10) Well, he looked at that and said, there's no way you're doing that. You know, my father used to come home. He's a very strict guy. And he was like, you're going to college and you're not going to live the life that I've lived. And he was very determined about that. His father was in a coal mine in northeastern Pennsylvania. So he felt like he had a leg up on his dad where he wasn't mining. Cole, you know deep underground he was actually outdoors in terms of the job that he had but he never went to college You Speaker 4 (2:37) were the first in your family to go to college So Speaker 3 (2:39) people say that as a little bit of a misnomer So my brother and I went to college together. My brother's a year older than me So he would be technically the first I'm the first person to go to law school And I'm the first person to go to a professional not straight away. Speaker 4 (2:51) Let's be honest You went straight to law school, but you failed the bar twice because I suppose what I'm getting at is It seems to me that the Mooch is a series of major highs and major lows. Speaker 3 (3:04) Yeah, absolutely. What happens is when you take, so you said something that I just want to correct a little, if you don't mind, you Speaker 4 (3:11) said Speaker 3 (3:11) self-made. So I don't believe anybody is actually self-made. I don't say that with any level of self-deprecation. I just mean, honestly, you need a group of people around you to help you. My parents helped me. There were university teachers that helped me. There were high school teachers. My high school guidance counselor I still think about. I write about in the back of the book in the acknowledgement section the first grade principal who got me the fever to start reading. So you need a whole collection of people. And I imagine you have that in your life. Well, it's interesting. You Speaker 4 (3:43) built Speaker 3 (3:43) your career. You have to have a group of people. You can't do it on your own. It's interesting. You need help. Speaker 4 (3:47) All the really successful guys I know. Yeah. And when I mean successful, I mean the guys who've. had a really interesting life. They may have made a lot of money. They may not have. But what they've got to is a point where they're like, you know what? I'm okay with me. Speaker 3 (4:01) They all had that person Speaker 4 (4:04) when they were young who, outside of their family, went, listen, who spotted they had something about them and nurtured it. No Speaker 3 (4:12) question. That was the teacher who said, read, for goodness sake, read. I've certainly had that. There was a provost at Tufts University. who actually wrote my recommendation to Harvard Law School. Without him, I don't think I would have gotten in. He's 92 years old today. I try to visit him every year. I fly to Boston. He's in a home in Winchester, Massachusetts. I go to see him, you know, pay homage to him. Speaker 4 (4:33) That's the other similarity. All the people I know, that person, they made sure that they stayed in their life for the duration of certainly that person's life. And Speaker 3 (4:42) by the way, I sent him this manuscript long ago and got some really good advice from him. Yeah, Start Again. Speaker 4 (4:48) Was it Start Again? Speaker 3 (4:49) No, it wasn't that. But he did tell me that I was wrong about certain things, certain facts that I had to adjust. Start Again. Speaker 4 (4:57) So you grew up, but it seems like there is... That would be a good book title, by the way, Start Again. There's been a couple of restarts. I've had Speaker 3 (5:06) a Speaker 4 (5:06) start and a restart on more than one occasion. You talked about your dad, but also there's very, very strong women in your... formative years as well in terms of your mother and your grandmother and the effect that they had on you. Speaker 3 (5:20) No question. Yeah, I mean, my grandmother made me Catholic, beat it into us effectively. With a wooden Speaker 4 (5:25) spoon. Speaker 3 (5:25) With a wooden spoon. She also used to bite her because you, all these Italians in the back, look at me. My grandmother did that. You were running, man. You were going to get hit with something. Could have been a shoe, a spoon. Speaker 4 (5:35) Something was going to happen. My mother had this thing. It was like, it was a spoon like that. It was like a porridge stirrer. I mean, they never actually hit us with it, but like if it went, it hung on the wall. And if there was a reach for that, you're like, you were gone. You were out the door. We got Speaker 3 (5:49) hit. We got hit. I mean, this was old school Italian stuff back in the 1960s. Yeah, we definitely got hit. Speaker 4 (5:54) Would you describe it as a happy childhood? I mean, you've alluded to the fact that there were issues and it Speaker 3 (6:00) was Speaker 4 (6:00) tough at home. Listen, Speaker 3 (6:01) I try to tell people as openly as possible because I have had some measure of success in my life and I don't want to hagiograph it. I feel that people that do that are making a mistake. I think it's important to tell people the true fabric of the thing because ultimately it'll make them feel comfortable about their own lives. We all have problems in our lives. My dad was very tough on us, beat the daylights out of it. He was rough on my mom. I have talked about it. You know, there's an American baseball hero by the name of Joe Torre. I don't know if you would recognize that name here in the UK, but he won the world championship for the Yankees as a manager. He was a great baseball player. Very, very close personal friend of mine. He's 84. And Joe has a foundation, which I'm a donor to. It's called Safe at Home Foundation. And why is it called that? Well, he got the living daylights beat out of him as a kid. His mother got beaten up. His brother, older brother, got beaten up by their dad. And he is trying to raise awareness of this type of activity and how harmful it is to young children. So, you know, I grew up in a rough house. You know, my older brother has cycled in and out of cocaine addiction for 40 years. I was very tough on him growing up in that house. He's better now. Well, it's the eldest, isn't it, sometimes can take the brunt of it. The eldest is at the tip of the spear. It's almost like Speaker 4 (7:17) he Speaker 3 (7:17) was like a, like I always look after my older brother, but he was like a secret service agent for me. He defended me from a lot of the nonsense that was going on. Speaker 4 (7:25) But it's the elder one, but also the middle. I mean, you know, I make no story about the fact that, you know, I struggled with addiction and alcoholism, whatever, you know, and I'm now, thankfully, a day at a time, 33 years sober. God bless you. It Speaker 1 (7:40) is a day at a time, Speaker 3 (7:42) by the way. Absolutely it is. And God bless you. And my brother is now five years sober again. That's great. And I'm very, very happy for him. And I've gone to meetings with him, you know, AA meetings or addiction meetings, talk about this issue. You know, I don't drink, not because I don't like drinking, probably because I like it too much. I'm nervous about it because I was trying to advance myself and get. Educated and if you're from a family that has these addiction issues, you've got to be very careful Yeah, Speaker 4 (8:10) because you know, it's you know, it's Speaker 3 (8:12) it's a family Speaker 4 (8:12) disease. Yes, sir, you know, it's a disease I Speaker 3 (8:15) know it's a disease and so we I'm Speaker 4 (8:17) the only one who had it in my family. I don't know but there we go Speaker 3 (8:20) Well, I like talking about it openly because I think it's helpful to people. Like, wait a minute, you know, you can survive Speaker 1 (8:25) this. Speaker 3 (8:25) Well, you shouldn't have any Speaker 4 (8:25) shame around it. The whole point is we're human beings. And, you know, people will look at you and you're in a beautiful suit, well-preserved for your age. Speaker 3 (8:33) Started in polyester, but I'm in Brioni now. I do, yeah. Speaker 4 (8:36) This is Giorgio Armani. It's very nice. You like it? Yeah, unlike, as you say, the black polyester thing that you turned up for your first Goldman Sachs Speaker 3 (8:43) meeting. Speaker 4 (8:43) I look like a Speaker 3 (8:44) young Guido undertaker from Brooklyn. And that Goldman Sachs partner was looking at me like, this dude could catch on fire right here. I mean, I was fully flammable on my first job. Speaker 4 (8:52) But Speaker 2 (8:52) again, I Speaker 4 (8:52) was sort of thinking, what are the three words that sort of sum the mooch up? I mean, one of them is resilient. You get the dream job at Goldman. Yeah. And then you get fired. And then you managed to get yourself rehired. Got rehired into Goldman. Two months later. Yeah. And then I ended up leaving. So. There's two parts to this. One is that we live in an age where it's very difficult for young people to determine that path because we're fed so much information all the time. To make a decision almost seems overwhelming. Speaker 3 (9:22) Social Speaker 4 (9:22) media influences. But the other thing as well is that going into Goldman, right, did you know what it was when you went in? No Speaker 3 (9:33) clue. Speaker 4 (9:33) Because it's got a certain reputation. It breeds a certain kind of alpha individual. So Speaker 3 (9:40) remember, this is Goldman in 2026, a little different from Goldman 1989. A little more collegial. It was a closed partnership. It was prior to the public offering, all that other stuff. But Goldman 1989 had no clue. And by the way, I always say this to people. I took that job. I was very money focused. I just lay it all out there. Why was I so money focused? I looked at my parents. I Speaker 1 (10:04) was Speaker 3 (10:04) like, OK, they're going to run out of money because they've got a tight budget now and they're not saving. And so they're not Speaker 1 (10:10) going to. They Speaker 3 (10:10) probably Speaker 4 (10:10) couldn't. That financial anxiety that you grew up with and talked about was meted across a much wider band of the population in America by how Bush approached. the war and taxation in that period. He pushed the deficit so far that it was only ever going to impact. To look good, he didn't raise taxes. It drew upon the working classes to kind of put boots on the ground. Speaker 3 (10:33) But he also, so what happens is when you create that level of deficit spending and then you don't tax people, you've created an unfunded tax liability. Like if you look at the legendary economist Milton Friedman, he would say all deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. You have to pay the piper more. And so how do you pay the piper? You inflate. We have a pernicious, regressive form of taxation that hammers the working class and lower middle-income people. They don't own assets. Speaker 4 (11:01) So Speaker 3 (11:01) now you're stealing their time and energy, right? They're making their money off their wages. You give them 1,000 British pounds, but you just told them that you inflated the money. And so now they have 700 pounds of purchasing power, and you've created this great anxiety. They can't catch up. So the deficit spending hurt is a very regressive thing to do. It hurts the working class more than anybody. The people