“I think what you have to do in life is you have to enjoy the journey and you have to handle the ups and downs like a gentleman or a gentlewoman, and not let it overly distract you from the long-term gains, or the long-term goals.”
Anthony Scaramucci is the Founder and Co-Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital. He also the founder and chairman of SALT Conference, a leading global conference that brings together leading investors, creators and thinkers to discuss big ideas in the world of finance, technology and public policy. He is the author of four books: The Little Book of Hedge Funds, Goodbye Gordon Gekko, Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole (a 2016 Wall Street Journal best seller), and Trump: The Blue-Collar President.
Growing up in the blue-collar town of Port Washington on Long Island offered Scaramucci the chance to hone his business skills that set the stage for rest of his adult life. Selling Newsday magazine subscriptions around age 12 to help with his family’s bills served as formative experience. “There was a seminal moment for me, and I believe this happens to everybody, you figure out somewhere between 11 and 17 what you're doing for your life… For me, I love sales.”
All of Scaramucci’s success has been built on the back of a long history of failures and setbacks. He credits his resiliency to the solace he takes knowing he’s just as happy living modestly as he did as a child. Those lessons were called upon most publicly in the days following his firing after an 11-day tenure as White House Communications Director in the Trump administration, creating a new unit of measure: 11 days = 1 Scaramucci.
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SPEAKER
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we launched during this work-from-home period, with leading investors, creators, and thinkers.
John Darsie: (00:29)
And what we're trying to do on these SALT Talks is replicate the experience that we provide at our global conferences, the SALT Conference, which we host twice a year in a normal environment, traditionally in Las Vegas, and then most recently in Abu Dhabi, and we're looking forward to getting those conferences back up and running as soon as it's safe for our constituents, but look forward to doing some virtual events later this year and early next year as well.
John Darsie: (00:52)
So, with SALT Talks, what we're doing, the same thing we're trying to do at our conferences, is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And today's guest is one that we've been working really hard to get for a long time. We're very excited about having him on SALT Talks. His name is Anthony Scaramucci. Mr. Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, which is a global alternative investment firm. He's also the founder and the chairman of SALT, and I'll spare you more biographical information about SALT, because if you're here, you probably already know.
John Darsie: (01:28)
Prior to founding SkyBridge in 2005, Anthony co-founded the investment partnership Oscar Capital, which he sold to Neuberger Berman in 2001. Prior to starting Oscar Capital, he was a vice president in the private wealth management division at Goldman Sachs. In 2016, Anthony was ranked number 85 on Worth Magazine's Power 100, which is a list of the hundred most powerful people in global finance. In 2011, he received Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year award in New York, in the financial services category. He's a member of several high profile organizations, including the Council on Foreign Relations. He's the vice chair of the Kennedy Center Corporate Fund Board. He's a board member of both the Brain Tumor Foundation and the Business Executives for National Security. He's a trustee of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Foundations.
John Darsie: (02:18)
He's the author of four books. The Little Book of Hedge Funds was his first book, followed by Goodbye Gordon Gekko, Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole, and then most recently, Trump, the Blue-Collar President, which obviously came prior to a little bit of an about-face that he did on the president as we head into Election Day tomorrow. In November of 2016, speaking of President Trump, Anthony was, after serving on the Trump campaign, he was chosen to the president-elect's 16-person executive committee on his transition team. So, when people talk about how he was there for 11 days, so he knows nothing about the president or the administration, I sort of laugh, because they're discounting the fact that he was on the campaign for nine months, and also played an integral role in the transition team as well.
John Darsie: (03:03)
Anthony is a native of Long Island, which is where I'm standing today, and where he's sitting today as well. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Tufts University in Boston, and a JD from Harvard Law School. A reminder if you have any questions for Anthony during today's SALT Talk, you can enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen. And usually I'll turn the interview over to Anthony, who acts as the moderator, but today, I'm the moderator, and Anthony is the one who's going to be roasted, so I'm looking forward to this.
John Darsie: (03:31)
And just like we do with all of our guests, Anthony, I want you... I read a little bit about your biographical information, but for people who maybe don't know you as well and haven't read your Wikipedia page, or they have and they're looking for a little bit more insight into how you grew up and how you became the Anthony Scaramucci that we know today, please tell people about your upbringing, your professional background, and how you got to where you are today with SkyBridge.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:54)
So, let me just... I've got something in my eye right here. Let me just get this out of my eye and then we can begin the interview. Hold on a second. Okay. I think I got it out of my eye.
John Darsie: (04:05)
The roast hasn't even started yet. I'm taking it easy on you so far.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:07)
So, it's interesting. So, John's wife... I think this is an important part of the story. So, John's wife's uncle was one of my best friends in high school. He stole my high school girlfriend, but that happens in high school, big deal. But we stayed friends, it's 40 years later. But John's older sister, who happens to be Sammy's mom... This would be Samantha Darsie, John's wife.
John Darsie: (04:33)
My mother-in-law.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:34)
Yeah. She basically said to me that I was a townie in Port Washington. Okay? So, these guys obviously grew up on a manor somewhere, but I was obviously a townie. And so, when I thought about that, I was like, she's 100% right. I was a total townie. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. You could drive by that neighborhood today, it's all blue collar people and blue collar houses. My mother won't leave the neighborhood no matter what, so God bless her. And the place where my dad worked is now a golf course, but it was a huge sand mine, and he worked there for 42 years. And what's interesting is [inaudible 00:05:08] actually... I helped him with it, but he really put up all the money. He built a monument of all those immigrants, Irish and Italian and Welsh immigrants that built that mine.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:19)
But it was a great town to grow up in because it was a good mix of wealthy people, middle class people, lower middle class people, low income housing, the sort of low income housing that Donald Trump says he doesn't want to put in suburbs, which is actually valuable to the suburbs for so many given reasons. And so, there we all were. It was a great public school education. But there was a seminal moment for me, and I believe this happens to everybody, you figure out somewhere between 11 and 17 what you're doing for your life. And so, I have a son who's 28, just graduated from Stanford Business School, he wanted to get into technology and biotech and the future, and so he went out to Silicon Valley. Now lives in Venice Beach, California, is building a telemedicine company. My 21-year-old son is like, "Dad, I love music and videography." He's working in the music industry. For me, I love sales.
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:11)
And so, when I was 13... I was probably a little younger than that. When I was 11, my dad got his hours cut back, and there was some economic anxiety now, so I went out and got myself a Newsday paper route. So, if you're riding along Long Island, I was delivering newspapers. And then I convinced Mr. [Fusco 00:06:28], may his soul rest in piece, to give me like 50 free papers on Wednesdays. And so, John would know where this is because he lives out here. There's this place called the Dolphin-Green Apartments. It's on Main Street in Port Washington. And at that time, it was just really Irish and Italian ladies, and they all knew my mom. My mom was like Siri before there was a Siri. If you wanted to know who was having an affair in Port Washington, call Maria Scaramucci, she could tell you. She had everybody's feet... She probably knew people's fingerprints, even.
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:55)
So, I would go into that apartment building with the free newspapers. I would knock on doors, hand out free newspapers, and then I would hit these Italian and Irish women up for subscriptions to Newsday. And so, I built a fairly large Newsday practice, and I gave the bulk of that money to my parents, and I kept some savings for me, and that's how my whole business career started. And I was like, "Someday, I'm going to have my own business. I'm going to make sure that I get myself educated." It's probably too long-winded, but I'm trying to run the clock out here on John Darsie. But go ahead, John. Keep going.
John Darsie: (07:26)
You're trying to avoid the hard questions.
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:28)
No, keep going.
John Darsie: (07:30)
I think it's helpful, and I think going later into your life, I think when people ask me to describe-
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:33)
But the fact that your mother-in-law called me a townie, I still... It's not like I forgot it or anything like that. I just want to make sure that you know that I'm still talking about it 35 years later.
John Darsie: (07:42)
Well, she's not wrong, but we'll move on from that. When people ask me to describe you in one word, a lot of times the word I use is resilience, and you've over the course of your life been able to train yourself to be resilient in a lot of different scenarios, and your path to success hasn't been a straight line. You describe yourself as being a middling student in high school. You got to Tufts and the academic light bulb went off. You obviously have enjoyed a lot of academic success, including going to Harvard Law School. You were fired from Goldman Sachs in the investment banking department before you went on into the private wealth management division. SkyBridge almost failed in 2008 before you pivoted and grew the business to what is now the largest RIC structured fund-to-funds in the country. And you were fired from the White House after 11 days, let me remind you about that.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:31)
I failed the bar, too. You forgot the bar exam. I failed the bar exam.
John Darsie: (08:33)
You failed the bar twice. I forgot about that. The list is too long.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:35)
I took the bar twice, yep.
John Darsie: (08:36)
We would run out the SALT Talk if we listed all of your failures and setbacks, but you've been able to bounce back and achieve success on the heels of all of those temporary setbacks.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:46)
It's really hard to believe I actually elected to do this with you. I'm going to come right through the window there.
John Darsie: (08:52)
If you were talking to an entrepreneur, how do you train yourself to be resilient, and what are other key lessons you've learned in business amid those failures or temporary setbacks?
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:02)
Well, here's the thing. When you grow up the way I grew up, for whatever reason, you're starting from scratch, so you're like, "If I got to go back to scratch, big deal." I always tell my kids, if I have to live in a one-bedroom apartment with a white tee shirt, it won't be a wife beater, I'm not that politically incorrect, it'll be just a regular Fruit of the Loom tee shirt, I could have a six-pack of Schlitz and a rabbit ear television to watch the Met games, I'm fine. And so, I think what you have to do in life is you have to enjoy the journey and you have to handle the ups and downs like a gentleman or a gentlewoman, and not let it overly distract you from the long-term gains, or the long-term goals.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:42)
And so, I got fired from my first job for probably the right reasons. I sucked at that job. I would like to tell you I was good at the job. I actually sucked at it. And so, what happened was, I wanted the cool job coming out of school, and the cool job at that time was Goldman Sachs, and it was Goldman Sachs Real Estate, Investment Banking. That's 31 years ago. So, I hustled for that job. I got the job, but the problem was I wasn't prepared for the job, and it really didn't fit my skillset or my personality. So, 18 months into the job, the Gulf War started, and we were in a recession, and the firm decided to start laying people off.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:17)
And a guy by the name of Mike Fascitelli, who went on to become the CEO of Vornado Realty, was my boss. He called me to his apartment on [Jane 00:10:25] Street. It was Friday night, February 1st. Not like I forget anything. It was Friday night, February 1st, 1991. I was 27 years old. He said I was fired. I was like, oh my God, because I had a lot of school debt, and I didn't really know if I was going to actually be able to figure everything out. He handed me an $11,000 severance check, John, and I was really bummed out. And then by that morning, I got up, I went for a run, and I was like, "All right, that job sucked. I wasn't good at it anyway. Let me see if I can go find myself another job. There's got to be another job out there."
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:58)
We were in a recession, so that was creating some anxiety. And then I didn't have a cellphone back then. It was 31 years ago. So, I was pumping quarters into payphones at Grand Central. And then one of my buddies said, "Well, there's jobs open at Goldman in the sales area, in institutional sales." And so, then I called Mike. And this is a lesson for young people who are listening. Don't burn bridges. I called Mike, and I said, "Hey, I got an opportunity upstairs on the 28th floor. Could you help me out?" And he did. And so, Mike and I are still very close to this day.
Anthony Scaramucci: (11:33)
It's the same thing when I got fired from the White House. When John Kelly fired me from the White House, first of all, I did something completely stupid, regrettable, but did it, and so I'm totally accountable for it. So, another learning lesson for young people. Don't go like this and try to blame other people. I admit to something stupid. I trusted somebody. The great irony is the reporter, his family was a 50-year friend of my dad. His father had worked with my dad on Long Island Construction, and so I did the stupid thing, I was transposing that relationship onto my relationship with the guy's son, and that was very, very stupid of me.
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:07)
And so, he wrote this salacious article. It wasn't even exactly what I said, but then when they finally played the recording, you realize it wasn't that nuts. It was just me being my typical antical self. I said some funny stuff about Steve Bannon. And by the way, everything I said about Steve Bannon was more or less true. The guy's a total whack job, so we can talk about that if you want. But, I'm fired, and so General Kelly and I got off on the wrong foot, but look at us now. We've had him on the SALT Talk, we've had him in Abu Dhabi with us, we had him in Las Vegas. I talked to him last weekend. We have a terrific relationship. I'm going with General Kelly to Iowa in January where we're going to be speaking together, and I had him at the Biltmore Hotel in January of this past year, so him and I are on a speaking tour together, and it's been a lot of fun.
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:54)
And so, what do you do? You've got to make lemonade out of lemons, man. You don't sit there and cry about it. I just want you to imagine... and my son, my oldest son, he put together a 15-minute composite video of me getting my ass kicked by late night comedians. It's sort of humiliating, right? It was 15 solid minutes of Jack Oliver and Seth Meyers and all these different people. It was absolutely brutal. But thank God, for some reason it's never gotten on the internet, thank God. But, yeah, I looked at it, I said, "Okay, this is a rough situation. I'm going to get bounced. I got roughed up in the press. And so, I'm just going to go back and do what I know how to do, and try to speak honestly about situations," and I think that's a lesson, John. Look, we got our asses kicked in March. You don't see me complain about it.
John Darsie: (13:39)
Just keep going forward.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:41)
Some people fired us. Other people hired us. My attitude is always live below your means, always save a little bit of money, and this way, when you get a little older in life, you have a little bit of a cushion, and then some good things happen. My buddy, Steve Cohen, is buying the Mets. I own a piece of that. That's great. And you have to stay balanced, and you have to look at the long run, and try not to burn bridges. So, your obvious question is going to be, "Well, what about you and Trump?" It's nothing personal with me and Trump. It's fine. He's just not fit to be the President of the United States. That's all. It's not a personal thing. It's just, to me, I think there's something off with the guy. It's too dangerous for the country.
John Darsie: (14:15)
Let's frame the whole thing. Let's frame the whole thing. So, you support Scott Walker as the Republican nominee. He fails. You support Jeb Bush as the nominee. He fails. You join the Trump campaign, despite the fact that you don't share a ton of values with Trump, but you thought he could be a pragmatic, post-partisan president. You go to his rallies, and it opens your eyes to what's going on in the country. There's a lot of blue collar people like the people that you grew up around in Port Washington, like your dad grew up around in Pennsylvania, who are really struggling, who feel like they're not part of this American growth story anymore.
John Darsie: (14:50)
And you wrote a book about it. Even after you left the administration, people say, "Oh, you turned on Trump because he fired you." Actually, that's not accurate. You stayed loyal to him and you actually wrote a book praising him and his work in appealing to the blue collar base of the country. But something happened. It was a process, really, that took place, that you eventually sort of rescinded your support of him, and you're now obviously campaigning against him and for Vice President Biden. So, what was that process like? What did Trump tap into-
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:18)
Okay, so this is unlike Sandra Smith on Fox News, you're going to let me explain it. It's just very simple. It's not a personal thing. Imagine the two of us are on the board of a publicly traded company. We select somebody to be the CEO, and then they demonstrate four years of this type of behavior, this type of policy decisions, and they're going off on their Twitter feed the way that he's doing. You're like, "Okay, this is not the right guy for us." It's not the right guy.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:43)
And so, what happens in our country, it's not a hiring decision, it's a popularity contest or something, and then the media sets up this narrative that we have this great culture war, that this is a battle doing capitalism and socialism, or communism. It's a bunch of nonsense. It's not true. It's not capitalism or communism. We have a political construct in our country where we have a safety net for people that are indigent, but we have by and large a bureaucratic, capitalistic system, but you have to have some regulation and you have to create some opportunity for people that are starting at uneven places in the starting block. I grew up in Port Washington. That was a great public school. If I grew up in an inner city somewhere, maybe I wouldn't have gotten the same education that I got.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:27)
And I think that that's the unfairness in our society. Life, of course, is unfair, but a good quality government is designed to try to create equal opportunity. I'm not about equal outcome. A candidate for the vice presidency, Senator Kamala Harris, she tweeted out something yesterday, people said, "Oh, that's communism." Go look at the tweet. Someone's starting behind the other guy. All she's trying to say is that a good government, an energetic government, it's not a left or right policy. It's a right or wrong policy. Let's even up the educational system so that people no matter where they're born, they can have a shot at things. That's good capitalism, if anything. That's not bad capitalism.
Anthony Scaramucci: (17:07)
So, my evolution with the president is very simple. He fired me. No problem. Stayed loyal to him. Went out to advocate for him. Now he's separating women from children. He's putting the kids in cages. Okay. You can't argue for that. I'm sorry. So, I denounced that. Then he's in Helsinki, he's saying that he believe Vladimir Putin over the intelligence agencies. Okay, you can't really abide by that. Then he's calling the press the enemy of the people. Him and Steve Bannon are ginning that up. Well, I'm a big believer in the free press. And by the way, I do not have standing with the free press. They beat the living hell out of me, and I have no problem with it. God bless, I talk to the reporters that beat me up as much as I talk to the reporters that don't beat me up, and my attitude is, you're a public figure, take the hits, who cares?
Anthony Scaramucci: (17:51)
But the thing about the press, John, it's very important people understand this, without the press, you don't have the innovation or the economic engine, because you're teaching young kids to speak and think freely. You're doing that in the first and second grade. They go on and create Facebook or Google or Apple Computer or an AI software technological platform. If you're censoring the internet like they do in China, or you're telling people they can't talk about politics, you start to narrow out their way of thinking, and they have to steal your intellectual property. They don't have the bandwidth to create it. And so, it's an important element of the country's success.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:27)
So, I wrote an article, The Press is Not the Enemy of the People. The president called me on Easter Sunday, super pissed at me, and he said, "Oh, the press is the enemy of the people." I said, "Well, they're not. Read the article." "I don't have to read the article. I read the headline." I go, "All right, fine. Don't you want the independents? Don't you want the moderates?" And this is a very telling thing about the president. "No, I don't want them. I'm going to focus on my base, and I'll let everything take care of itself." Okay. I said, "Look, that's a bad recipe. That's not going to work." He hung up the phone. He was sore at me. It was the last time I spoke to him. And it's fine.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:00)
And now we're going into the summer time, and he's going after the squad. So, these are four women that are in the Congress, some are African-American, some are Muslim-American, some are Hispanic-American, going after them. He's writing that they should go back to the countries they originally came from. What are you doing? Can't talk like that. That is racism. That is racism. That is American nativism. You can't talk like that. So, I said, "Hey, I'm on the show." I said, "I'm sorry, I'm not going to approve that. I don't sanction that."
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:31)
Rudy Giuliani, you know this, and Rudy has said this. I go back 30 years with Rudy. I wrote him a check when I was 25 years old when he ran for mayor the first time in '89 unsuccessfully. I said to the mayor, I said, "Come on, man. You can't accept that. Your grandparents, your Italian-American grandparents were told by racists and nativists to go back to the country they originally came from. You're going to accept that? You can't disavow your personal story and all your personal integrity to accept that sort of stuff." But Rudy said, "Yeah, no, I'm going to accept it." Rudy's going full bar right now. I don't know. I feel bad about it. I choose to view Rudy the way he was when I was a kid and he was cleaning up New York City. I don't like to look at him the way he is today.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:13)
So, here we are now. Then the president goes after me, okay? That's fine. I'm a public figure. Ha ha, he he, you can tweet about me. And then I got to go after him, because you know my personality. I'm not going to sit there. So, I think I called him Fidel Adolf Trump. I think you were there. I had to get the fat shaming in. I called him the Notorious FAT. And then I think I got knocked off Twitter for 12 hours. You probably remember that. It was my first and only time that I've been knocked off Twitter. And then, he went nuts, and he goes after my wife. Who does that? He's going after my wife, the President of the United States. Who does that? I raised and gave the guy millions of dollars. I was on his executive team. When everyone thought he was losing after Access Hollywood, Chris Christie and I went and raised money at the Hunt and Fish Club for his transition, who no one thought he was going to have. We were out there raising money for it, giving money to it. He goes after my wife? You got to be nuts.
Anthony Scaramucci: (21:07)
So, I'm not Ted Cruz. You know that. I think Ted Cruz knows that. Most people know I'm not Ted Cruz. You're going to come after my wife, after her and I almost got divorced after me working for you. You know Deidre. She hates Trump. She probably doesn't hate him as much as Melania hates him, but it's up there. It's up there.
John Darsie: (21:23)
Nobody hates Trump more than Trump hates himself, and we've talked about that, but I'm losing my editorial independence now.
Anthony Scaramucci: (21:29)
Well, that might be true. Now he's coming after my wife. He knows her and I were in a battle over our marriage, almost got divorced. It's just this ruthless, insensitive, unempathetic nonsense. That was it. So, I got up in August of last year, and I said, "This guy's crazy. There's something wrong with this guy. He's irrational. He alienates people that could be allies of his. He doesn't have a unifying message. And he's crazy." And then people said to me I'm crazy, he's going to soundly win reelection. I said, no he's not. He's not going to win reelection because he's nuts. And there'll be a crisis that happens and he'll mishandle the crisis.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:04)
Now, just quickly, and you were in this meeting, we had a senior cabinet official come to SkyBridge. Sat on the couch last October. And the senior cabinet official said-
John Darsie: (22:15)
And this is a real senior cabinet official, not a New York Times senior cabinet official.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:19)
No, this was somebody named in the cabinet, a well-known name that everybody knows. And he said, "We're not going to be able to handle a crisis because the president, respectfully, can't manage anything." And so, if a crisis comes, you don't have any orchestration, any delegation, you're not running it off the Fred Greenstein, the Princeton professor, or the Richard Neustadt, the Harvard professor that studied the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. There's no managerial process in the executive branch, this cabinet official said. And a result of which when a crisis comes, it's going to be a disaster.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:54)
And when the Soleimani strike happened, I was like, "Okay, this is the crisis that was being referred to." Thank God that abated. That seems like it's a hundred years ago now. And then we got COVID-19. And then he did exactly what people that are close to him that are honest about it would say that he would do. John Kelly, H. R. McMaster, myself. What would he do? He's insecure with the experts. The expert comes in, gives him the expert opinion, and he's insecure about it. They're talking in full sentences, and they got well educations and stuff. He's insecure. So, now he's got to do the opposite of what they're suggesting, because as General McMaster used to call it, it was an intuitive reflexive response to try to show the person that he knew better and that he was smarter than them.
Anthony Scaramucci: (23:44)
Okay. Maybe that will work in opinion-based stuff, and maybe it will work in foreign policy in certain areas, maybe. I want to be as fair as possible. But it's not going to work in science. You're not going to be able to say, "Okay, listen, the South Koreans are going to do the following to handle the epidemic, and they're listening to their epidemiologist. Now they have 20 deaths per million. And the United States is going to do the exact opposite and we're going to have this total chaotic response, and we're going to tell supporters of the president that they shouldn't wear masks, and we should just run rampant through the country," when we have guys like Anthony Fauci saying, "Well, if you do that, we're going to have tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths."
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:26)
And so, you got the crisis. The crisis impacted the president's personality. The president mishandled and lied about the crisis. And then he did, which is the most ironic thing, he wrecked the economy. And so, we can pretend that he's better for the economy than Joe Biden, but he's not. He's not better, because you got to handle the crisis. You got to make the people healthy first before the economy's going to respond.
John Darsie: (24:49)
Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. You've been very vocal in the media talking about how you think Joe Biden is the better candidate for the economy and for markets, in spite of the fact that he's talking about raising income taxes for people making more than $400,000 a year, in spite of the fact that he's talking about raising the corporate tax rate. When you talk about pure corporate cash flows and you look at the stock market as a reflection of things that are going on in the economy, even though it's not exactly a reflection of the economy, why do you think that sacrificing tax rates for corporations and wealthy Americans is worth it and is offset by other normalcy that Joe Biden will bring to the table?
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:32)
Okay. Well, the first thing, you have to either believe or not believe. I believe that the president is threatening the institutions of our democracy and the checks and balances in the system. You don't have to believe that. Just go look at what he's saying. Look at his rhetoric. And Michael Cohen, myself, and others that know him know that he doesn't joke around. So, he's trying to subvert the process, and he would like to jail his political opponents, and he would like to stay in the White House. All of this despotic nonsense is stuff that he really believes.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:59)
And so, when you've got the President of the United States in the middle of an election saying, "Well, I may or may not accept the peaceful transfer of power," you're like, "Okay, hold on a second. What made us a beacon of hope for mankind and a shining city on a hill is that we did that, and that we had an understanding in the country that we were going to do that peacefully. You can't talk like that from the American presidency anymore that you can tell people that were born in the United States, like members of the squad, three of them were born here, one's a naturalized citizen, to go back to the countries that they originally came from."
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:27)
So, it's classically un-American what he's doing. And so, I would stipulate to all my friends in business that he's very dangerous to the rule of law, and one of the cornerstones that has made American business so successful for hundreds of years is the predictability of the rule of law, the understanding that there is stare decisis, that there's precedent in the law, and that when we enter into legal contracts with each other, they're binding, and there will be some impartiality to that process. Moreover, if someone does something criminal in the country, we'll give them the right to defend themselves, and we'll presume that they're innocent, but there is some fairness there if you are harmed that someone will have justice sought against them.
Anthony Scaramucci: (27:16)
And so, you can't have this nonsense. So, without that, and then the next layer is, well, we got to be healthy. So, we can't have someone lying about the science or not having any managerial skills to handle a crisis, or having such insecurity that they can't even talk to people in the room. They have one run-on sentence where they talk to themselves in this stream of consciousness nonsense, where you've got real experts in the room that can tell you how to do something. And so, you keep going. Okay, well, his tax rates are better than Joe Biden's. Well, we don't know that necessarily. The Obama administration did not raise taxes for several years because the economy was too weak. I don't think that you're going to see a tax hike immediately. I just don't see it, because the economy can't afford it. The economy's in bad shape.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:04)
The flip side, though, is we had Stephanie Kelton, who's a modern monetary theorist on our SALT Talks. I read her book, The Deficit Myth. She makes a compelling case for deficits not mattering. But she then also says in the book, chapter six, or five, that deficit's do matter, that you can't run it ridiculously where you're running a 50, 60% deficit per year on your operating budget. You don't want to rack up $100 trillion of debt. And so, the great irony here is that the president's done that. If you look at the Obama administration and what they were doing, it's more classically Republican than the Trump administration.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:45)
So, there's a tremendous amount of hypocrisy, and then you have the news organizations that are fragmentized, and they're speaking into echo chambers in our society now, John. And so, there's a lot of people... I'm saying this. The flaps are going down over the readers. They don't want to hear it. Other people say, "Okay, that makes sense," and then they'll disagree with me on something else, and then bam, we've got the whole demonization thing going again, where we can't just be Americans having civil discourse and honest disagreements and working towards a consensus to come up with the right ideas. We have to have this black or white demonic thing, where if you don't agree with me, you're the devil, and this guy doesn't agree with me, he's the devil, and it's a battle between communism and capitalism. It's not. It's not a battle between communism and capitalism.
Anthony Scaramucci: (29:30)
Moreover, there's no culture war. On certain news media, they've got people believing that Trump is the last white man standing from the latte drinking hoards of Hispanic and African-American transvestites that are going to come up over the transom and take over the culture. That's how they talk to those people. It's not going to happen. First of all, I don't dictate how people live if they're living in the city of New York or South Dakota or Texas or California anymore than those people dictate the way I live here on Long Island. That is the most unbelievable gift of being American, that you have that level of freedom.
Anthony Scaramucci: (30:07)
And so, let's break down all of these myths about what's going on, and then this will clinically get the people involved. Is Joe Biden the perfect guy? No. I'm not saying he's the perfect guy. But he's a better guy than President Trump would be in this situation.
John Darsie: (30:21)
So, let's talk about that. So, there's two separate questions here. There's, what do you think the ultimate outcome of the election is going to be, and how do you think it's going to play out tomorrow on Election Day, despite the fact that in a lot of states, the turnout so far in early voting and in mail-in voting has already exceeded the total vote for 2016? But tomorrow is still Election Day. How do you think, ultimately, the election's going to play out? What's the map going to look like? Who's going to win? And then, how do you think things are going to play out tomorrow?
Anthony Scaramucci: (30:54)
Okay, so I'm not talking my book. I'm looking at it clinically-
John Darsie: (30:55)
Yeah, but this is objectively. This is not you rooting for Biden. This is objective view.
Anthony Scaramucci: (30:56)
Yeah. I'm looking at it the way a money manager would look at it, an analyst. Forget about who I want to have win. How do I think it's going to play out, is I think it's going to be consistent with where the polling is. There's an outlier poll called Trafalgar. They got more things right last time than they got wrong. They're calling it closer than, say, the RealClearPolitics average. And the RealClearPolitics average made a few Midwestern States... I think they missed them by a few points, but it was still roughly inside the margin of error.
Anthony Scaramucci: (31:29)
And so, if you look at the polling, you give the president the benefit of the doubt of the margin of error, he's going to lose the election. He's going to get routed by Vice President Biden. But, the other thing that I'm looking at are things like the Bet Fair Market, the Predictive Market. I'm a money manager, so I like following the money. Joe Biden, as of last night, is a two-to-one favorite. Now, there's gamblers on this call, there's people that understand odds. A two-to-one favorite is a very strong favorite. So, when Nate Silver's saying it's a 90% chance, sure, there's a 10% chance, but let me put it to you this way. I'd have to take a coin out of my pocket and flip it heads four times in a row for Mr. Trump to win. That does happen. So, he could win reelection, but the more likely scenario is that one of those will come up tails as I'm flipping, possibly more than one.
Anthony Scaramucci: (32:20)
And I don't see it happening. Anything can happen. But he doesn't have the groundswell that he had last time. And he happens to be the polarizing candidate this time, not Vice President Biden. And you've got a pandemic going on, and what Carville would say, 28 years ago, James Carville, "It's the economy, stupid." Today's mantra is it's the pandemic, stupid, because the pandemic is tied to the economy, and 67% of the Americans say they would trust Vice President Biden with the handling of the pandemic than President Trump. So, he's going. And so, the question is, how wide of a margin is he going, and then, what is he going to do, what kind of antic is he pulling?
Anthony Scaramucci: (33:02)
Now I'm going to say something some people are not going to like. I don't think he's playing to win this thing. If you look at his speeches or the rallies, what he's saying at these things, he's not really trying to open the tent or trying to get people to vote for him as much as he's trying to create a ruckus. I think he's trying to set himself up for a post-presidency that could be filled with media appearances or filled with some kind of political power related to this movement that he's created. And I also think if he's in trouble anywhere, he's going to want to use that political power to help him and his family if there's potential investigations that he's worried about.
John Darsie: (33:39)
So, Axios reported in the last couple days that he's telling people that if there's any hint that he might have a chance to win tomorrow, he's going to declare victory, and he's going to throw everything into a little bit of chaos. So, he would need to lose probably North Carolina or Florida for us to have a definitive proof by tomorrow night, Election Day, that he's likely lost the election. Do you expect him to lose states like North Carolina or Florida, or do you expect this to drag out for a couple days as we count all the ballots in a place like Pennsylvania?
Anthony Scaramucci: (34:11)
So, you're looking at the same polls, everyone on this call is looking at the same polls, so I don't have any insight there. I did a call with the Lincoln Project yesterday, and they think definitely that he's going to lose tomorrow by wide enough margins. I don't remember them specifically saying anything about Florida or North Carolina. But Bill Crystal, somebody I'm close to, he's done polling in Florida, independent polling, and thinks that the Vice President is up anywhere from 3-5%. So, that's still inside the margin of error. But if I had to guess, because of what's going on with seniors and suburban women, I'm guessing he's going to end up losing Florida, and that will be a very big deal. He won't be able to manifest any of these ideas that he's coming up with with Axios.
Anthony Scaramucci: (34:57)
If for some reason he doesn't lose Florida and it gets a little heated and more contested, he'll try to do things, but if you've got states certifying the elections and therefore bringing in the electors, one strategy that's been proposed is that he goes and sues everybody and says that the state legislatures should be picking the electors, and there's more state legislators that are Republican controlled, and try to subvert the electoral college and get the state legislators to pick the electors instead of the American people, and some vagueries about that. Even though he has such acolytes and he's had such amazing sycophants in the leadership of the Republican Party, I choose to believe that somebody like Mitch McConnell at that point will say, "All right, man, you've got to go."
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:43)
And this is a real lesson in demagoguery, because a demagogue can't do what it's doing without the help of people. You've got to have willing accomplices to do that. So, if you want to lie about the Ukraine and you want to see if you can get a blackmail scheme going with the president of the Ukraine, that's great. Okay. But, what are you going to do? You're not going to be able to... I don't know. You have 52 people that voted against it. Mitt Romney voted for it, understood the law. We've gotten ourselves into this politicization situation which is I think unfair for the country.
John Darsie: (36:20)
So, let's talk about something you do know about. You talked about you don't have any more data related to polling than anyone else has, but Pennsylvania is an area that I think you have a particularly keen sense of. You spent a lot of time in 2016 campaigning alongside people Like Don Jr. in Pennsylvania. Your dad's family is from the Scranton, Wilkes-Barre area. And Pennsylvania is seen as a key battleground here, because if Biden wins Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota the way people expect him to, then if he wins Pennsylvania, then he wins the election. What types of people do you think are ones that maybe voted for Obama in 2008, voted for Trump in 2016, and might be voting for Biden in 2020? What does that coalition look like? Why have they turned on Trump potentially, and why would they be attracted to Biden in this race?
Anthony Scaramucci: (37:10)
Well, they would be attracted to Biden because they would understand the way my dad understands having grown up in Wilkes-Barre and in that Scranton area that he's one of them. So, he actually has pathos and empathy for their struggle and empathy for the economic situation that many of those people are facing in terms of living paycheck to paycheck. I think Mr. Trump won those areas because Secretary Clinton, whether you like her or dislike her, I'm not picking on her, she probably didn't connect with those people, and those people have felt that establishment leaders have more or less left them to themselves. There's been a vacuum of advocation.
John Darsie: (37:48)
Despite the fact that she's from Pennsylvania.
Anthony Scaramucci: (37:50)
Yeah. She grew up in Wilkes-Barre as well. When I listen to Secretary Clinton speak, she sounds like my Aunt Eleanor, because my dad grew up... It's interesting. My dad grew up about four miles from where Secretary Clinton grew up, and 15 miles from Joe Biden. So, I know the area well, but I think the northeastern part of that state's going to go for Joe Biden in a way that will cause the state to flip over to Joe Biden. He may not get certain southwestern areas of the state or Pittsburgh, that still seem like they're for Mr. Trump. They believe in the cause of Mr. Trump.
Anthony Scaramucci: (38:25)
But here's what I would say to those people. And I have been saying this, because I've been doing local radio in those markets, and I've been doing local television, is that he's an avatar for your anger. He's been expressing what you're angry about. But he has not been offering a policy solution. He's had four years to offer a policy solution to what you're upset about, but he hasn't done that. And now he's threatening your elderly parents with the COVID-19 crisis. So, we may want to switch jockeys here and see if we can try something different.
Anthony Scaramucci: (38:53)
And by the way, Joe Biden is one of the, what I would call, a blue collar democrat. And so, I think you may get better policy response from Joe Biden than you would from President Trump who... He did a really big corporate tax cut, which I would say helped the stock market. It's unclear how much it helped wages at the bottom end. It didn't necessarily trickle down. But maybe Joe Biden can provide something that's more substantial for those people, and I think that's the right message.
John Darsie: (39:21)
So, you mentioned trickle down. Trickle down economics was a hallmark of Reagan Republicanism. And ideologically, I think we're starting to see a tipping point right now in the Republican Party. So, I think you still consider yourself a Republican, and you voiced a lot of concerns about the direction of the party. You've had people like the Lincoln Project, a group of what I would consider moderate Republicans who are trying to engineer a restructuring of the party. But 90% of Republicans support President Trump. Stuart Stevens wrote a great book, he's part of the Lincoln Project, about his role and how the Republican Party really is being exposed for its hypocrisy over the last 30 or so years.
John Darsie: (40:03)
How has the pandemic or even unrelated to the pandemic, how have things changed recently in terms of how you look at things like a social safety net, or how you look at things like access to healthcare, how you look at things like education? And when this is all over, and let's assume that Trump loses by as much as the polls suggest that he's going to lose by, how does that party restructure itself, and how do we basically build two parties where both of them believe that everyone's vote should be counted in an election, for example?
Anthony Scaramucci: (40:34)
Well, there's a lot of different potential outcomes for the party. Let's assume that he loses for a second. If he doesn't lose, party's going into a nuclear winter. It's going to become a white aging demographic. It's going to become a party of people that are buying catheters and My Pillows from Fox News commercial ads. That's what the party's going to be. And they're going to get trounced in 2024 and 2028. If they have a reckoning like they did in 1980 and they bring in leadership that has a wider bandwidth that can open the tent and can make the party look demographically more like the rest of the country, and they can reach out to people with different ideas that are necessarily, in my opinion, entrepreneurial ideas...
Anthony Scaramucci: (41:17)
The GI bill was an entrepreneur's ideas. Yes, it was a government program, but look at how many entrepreneurs sprouted out from that. The understanding of how to make big tech companies more innovative by potentially breaking them up, that's an entrepreneur's ideas. That's been going on for 15 years, looking at technology companies or businesses that need to be broken up so that there can be more innovation and more opportunity. The Andrew Yang stuff about universal basic income. You and I talked to Fareed Zakaria last week about a tax cut on the income. It's an earned income tax credit-
John Darsie: (41:56)
The earned income tax credit, yeah.
Anthony Scaramucci: (41:57)
... is what it's called. And so, there are ideas that you could present to people that all of a sudden, people that want better lives for themselves and their families, want more aspirational economic activity, want more self-reliance, also can get excited by. And so, if you're going to go down the rabbit hole of we're just going to have lower taxes and high deficit spending, this is the great irony about Trump's base. I think it's very important people understand this. Trump's base is the opposite of what you may think. They are religious conservatives, but they are by and large fiscally liberal, meaning that they want the Medicare, they want the Medicaid, they want the social security benefits, the workers' comp benefits, the unemployment benefits.
Anthony Scaramucci: (42:41)
And so, Trump understands that. And I've had conversations with him about it in 2016. People think that these people are fiscally conservative and they're religiously and socially conservative. They're not. They're the opposite of what people think. And so, I just think it's important that the Republicans have to figure out what the matrix should be to increase the size of the tent. If they go with Trumpism in 2024, I think they're going to get annihilated.
John Darsie: (43:07)
All right. We're going to go into SALT Talks overtime here because we have so much audience participation. I want to talk about, and this is an audience question, about your point about Trump somehow connecting with the forgotten man. He's been left behind by globalization. You wrote about this topic in an op-ed I believe this week. There's a lot of other social observations about income and wealth inequality, race inequality issues, the white grievance that's coming out of people who are now so fervently anti-immigrant. So, how do we make the argument for those people and bring them back into the fold rather than calling them deplorable and basically saying we're just going to ignore them in future elections? How do we bring them back into the fold and make that argument that the American dream still exists and is still attainable for them?
Anthony Scaramucci: (43:56)
So, obviously that's the question. And so, for me, I would want to offer those people a package of services from the government, and some of it could be education, some of it can be jobs training, education for their children, jobs training for themselves, and some liftoff package. It could be a UBI structure or it could be an earned income tax credit structure. But all of a sudden now, they've got some sense of fairness, and they've got some sense of fiscal stability. The amazing thing about the rejection of UBI by the very wealthy is that they're doing it for their kids. Every wealthy parent is giving UBI to their kids to help them get started. They say, "Oh, it's going to cost a lot of money. It's going to be deficit spending." Not necessary. It could be set up in a public/private partnership, where corporations get tax credits to help people, and all of a sudden those people are now inspired to go work for either of those corporations, or work on their own.
Anthony Scaramucci: (44:53)
What we're doing right now is because we're beating the living hell out of each other, we're not sitting down with any level of policy wonkishness to really go through what would work. And so, what I submit, and you've heard me say this publicly, we don't have a 10-year plan for America. We don't have a 15-year plan for America, a 20-year plan for America. We have a no-year plan for America. And so, while our adversaries and our competitors around the world are planning strategically, we're sitting here beating the living daylights out of each other during cable news segments.
Anthony Scaramucci: (45:24)
So, we could come up with a plan, and all of a sudden we can go to those people and say, "Okay, this is a better plan for you. We don't want you to be clinging to the state. We don't want you to be on the 'dole.' We don't want you to have us telling you how to live your life. We want to put money in your pocket and allow you to figure out a way to spend that money in the best interest of yourself and your family. We don't want it to be a top-down structure, but we want to give you some supplementation from the bottom to help lift you up." And I think that's the direction that the Republican Party has to go in, and still maintain a broad sense for propitious regulation and a broad sense for free market principles.
Anthony Scaramucci: (46:06)
But let's stop the hypocrisy you can't say, "I'm a free market guy," and then you want gas and oil credits, "I'm a free market guy, but Wall Street's blowing up, shoot me a trillion dollars to save my investment bank." You've got to look at it holistically, and you've got to say, "Okay, there's elements of the free market, and there's elements of incentives that work for people." That certainly inspired me. I believed 35 years ago if I worked hard, got educated, took some level of rational risk, I would create some amount of financial independence for myself.
John Darsie: (46:34)
Are you worried about deficits? You talked about Stephanie Kelton. We had her on a SALT Talk a couple months ago. She's one of the leading evangelists for modern monetary theory. The Republican Party seems to be concerned about deficits when there's a democrat in office but not when there's a Republican in office. But, we don't know what the long-term effect of these rising deficits and our rising debt will be. Are you concerned about that, or do you think as John Maynard Keynes would say, which we also had Zach Carter on who wrote a great book about Keynes as well, do you think the investment that we make today is going to be worthwhile in terms of the short-term deficit, in terms of the long-term prosperity that it's going to create for the country?
Anthony Scaramucci: (47:14)
I'm worried about deficits, but not in the classic sense that we were trained to worry about deficits. When Dick Cheney said deficits didn't matter, I didn't realize he was a modern monetary theorist when he said it. So, I've done a lot of work on it. I've read Stephanie's book. We interviewed Stephanie. What I would say is that the balance sheet of the United States is big enough to handle what we're doing right now. You've got 28% of the land in the United States is owned by the US Government, and there is natural resources under that land that's probably $60 trillion. So, if we were a company, and-
John Darsie: (47:50)
It's probably undershooting it, to be honest.
Anthony Scaramucci: (47:52)
Okay, I'm probably undershooting it. I'm just giving you a rough market base estimate. Maybe it's $100 trillion. But, the point being is if you've got a $30 trillion debt and you've got $60 trillion worth of assets, and you've got a $22-23 trillion economy with a robust tax base, you can handle the deficit spending. Where Stephanie and I disagree intellectually is that what ends up happening is if you get too much deficit spending, what ends up happening is the Central Bank always moves to monetize the debt. And so, this is why digital currencies are en vogue now, but let me just give you this example.
Anthony Scaramucci: (48:28)
We became a fiat currency in mid-August of 1971. So, that's 49 years ago. At that point, as a result of the Bretton Woods deal in 1944, one ounce of gold was worth $35 USD. When we pulled the pin on the gold standard and we let the dollar float, you tell me, John, I haven't seen it this morning, but it's probably like $2,000 an ounce now. So, we went from $35 an ounce to $2,000 an ounce. I'm just giving you the virtual realtime examination of how we devalued our money, how we monetized the debt. The house that I'm living in now, you would have to buy this house... It would be probably 1/20th of the price that I paid for this house.
Anthony Scaramucci: (49:16)
And so, it's an example of monetizing. When you monetize, the rich stay rich, because they own assets, and their assets are going up in price alongside of the amount of money that's being printed. Nobody cares. But the poor can't catch up. And if you look at the wages of the poor, they're down. My dad's wages, and I told Mr. Trump this in 2016, my dad's wages, his 1976 wages in 2016 were down about 26% in 40 years. So, you've got to fix that. That's fixable, but you've got to be very careful with too much deficit spending, because that's one of the negative side effects of it.
John Darsie: (49:59)
So, let's talk about foreign policy for a second. We have a question about the Middle East as an example. So, Trump has unsurprisingly taken a lot of credit for the Abraham Accords, which is, they call it a peace deal between Israel and the UAE. I think that's a little bit of a misnomer. Those two countries were not, in fact, at war, but it's a normalization of relations, which is a very positive thing. And we did our SALT Conference in the UAE, and have a lot of friends in the region, and it's a very positive development. We have a lot of friends in Israel as well.
John Darsie: (50:29)
But if you bring Vice President Biden into that seat, the presidential seat, how do you expect the current foreign policy of the United States to change, and also, how do you think it would be different relative to what President Obama pursued in terms of his foreign policy, not just in the Middle East, but all over the world? One area that you see plenty of people who served in the state department or in the Department of Defense, they had some frustration with some of Obama's foreign policy. And obviously there's elements of Trump's foreign policy that are problematic, and we won't get into different allegations of why that might be the case. But, what do you expect Biden foreign policy to be, and what do you say to people who are concerned about a shift there back into some of Obama's foreign policies in the region?
Anthony Scaramucci: (51:17)
So, John, what I would say, and it would be a very broad stroke here, what I would say is that learn something from President Trump. I want to be fair to him. He made the bold decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem. It didn't have the impact that other consensus people thought it would. I accept that there's been a 15-year relationship between the UAE and Israel, and with UAE and Bahrain, and they've had a good working relationship. But to formalize it, I want to give Jared Kushner and President Trump credit for that as well. I think that they helped nudge that along. I think that's very, very good for peace and stability. That air traffic, those commercial ideas transferring is very good for peace and stability.
Anthony Scaramucci: (51:59)
A critic would say, "Well, where are the Palestinians? Why are they not at the table?" You and I went to that peace initiative in June of 2019 in Bahrain at the Four Seasons, and we listened to what I thought was a very well thought out economic plan for the Palestinians, but unfortunately, it's not married to the dignity of political rights. And so, you're not going to be able to say, "Okay, I'm going to make you rich, but you're going to be enslaved by me." That's not going to work. So, you have to figure out a way to give dignity through the political process and then marry it to this economic aspiration. And that has to be solved for still. Those are very complex problems.
Anthony Scaramucci: (52:40)
One of the things that happened to me as a result of getting into politics is that you study the thing, or you read a daily briefing, like, "Oh my God, this is way more complex than I originally thought or the way it's reported in the news." And so, it's very complex. But I want to give the president credit for those things. And what I would say to the Vice President is be careful with Iran. President Obama went in a direction of empowering them through the Nuclear Deal. And some people in the region felt that that was sort of like empowering the bully in a neighborhood. And so, you're trying to get the neighborhood bully to come to the table so that you can stop the neighborhood bully from bullying people, but you may in fact be empowering the bully as opposed to disempowering them.
Anthony Scaramucci: (53:22)
So, I would want them to be cautious with Iran, and I think our friends in the Persian Gulf would say that. I think our friends in Israel would also say that. But, I think the good news is, is that there'll be more strategic thinking around our relationship with China, and more strategic thinking around the Western Alliance, and how to strengthen the Western Alliance and hit it in a positive reset as opposed to the sort of stuff that President Trump has been doing, by attacking Western leaders and Democratic leaders and praising dictators. I just think it's a bad reflection on the United States.
John Darsie: (53:58)
So, let's leave it with just a couple final questions about tomorrow. So, I think that's what everyone is focused on right now, is how the election's going to play out. We have a question from a member of our audience about the shy Trump voter. So, in 2016, there was a large swath of undecided voters and shy Trump voters. Do you think that phenomenon is going to play out again to the point that it could lead to massive margin of error in the polls, which is what would be necessary for Trump to win, or do you think that's a misnomer and conditions are a little bit different here in 2020?
Anthony Scaramucci: (54:30)
So, I think they are different. I do think that we've got more polling data around those differences. Even with more polling data around the differences, let's build in a few percentage points for the shy Trump voter. Let's say, and I'll use the Nate Silver example, let's say the polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, and then let's add two points to that, and when you make those two points be favorable to the president, he still loses. So, it may be there.
Anthony Scaramucci: (55:01)
But, listen, he'll have lost this election primarily because of himself. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if he had just said, "Okay, wow, got a crisis, let's look how the South Koreans are handling it, this seems like best practices. How are those guys handling it? Well, okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to keep the American people safe. I'm going to get out on the phone, I'm going to tell them this is exactly what we're going to do. Listen to these experts. We're going to do this in an appropriate way so that we can get the virus under control so that we can experience economic growth when the virus is over," he would've won resounding reelection. But he didn't do that.
Anthony Scaramucci: (55:38)
And so, he wrecked the economy, and he created this self-loathing, self-destructive setup for himself. And so, if he loses tomorrow, and I predict he will, he'll have to answer to that at some point in his mind. He'll have to say, "Okay, well, how did that go so badly for me?" And when it didn't necessarily have to.
John Darsie: (55:59)
Well, we're going to leave it there. We could obviously cover a lot of different ground related to SkyBridge, SALT, and the election, but given everything that's coming up tomorrow, we figured we'd focus on that. Thank you, Mr. Scaramucci, for joining us today. I took it pretty easy on you. I thought it was going to be more like a roast, but you talked too much, so I didn't get my barbs in.
Anthony Scaramucci: (56:17)
I tried to filibuster you. There was someone that asked about telemedicine and tinnitus. So, unfortunately, I experience tinnitus, so just 30 seconds on that. No cure for that yet, but there will eventually be a cure for that, and so we just got to stay patient. I worked on a construction site as a kid, and you weren't protecting your ears the way you should've, and I'm sure a lot of us have been to rock concerts over the years as well. But we will get a cure for that.
Anthony Scaramucci: (56:42)
All right, John, thank you. May keep you around. I don't know, I was thinking about firing you after the Fareed Zakaria situation, where you were just ripping into me, but you were pretty gentle on me today, so we'll probably keep you around.
John Darsie: (56:53)
All right. Sounds like a plan. Well, we have you hosting Governor Cuomo now on Thursday, so that should be an exciting talk. Hopefully by Thursday we have a picture of who the next president's going to be, and I know you're hoping it goes in one direction, but-
Anthony Scaramucci: (57:05)
I think we will. I think we will. One way or the other, but I do think we will.
John Darsie: (57:07)
I know our office is in-
Anthony Scaramucci: (57:11)
And then we've got to work on healing the country, my brother. All right, man. Thank you.
John Darsie: (57:13)
All right. Take care, Anthony. Thank you for joining us on the other side of the ledger, to where you normally sit on SALT Talks. It was a lot of fun, and maybe we'll do that again in the future once we have an outcome for the election. Maybe in the first quarter we can talk about what Biden's first 100 days might look like and preview some of our conferences that we have coming up in 2021 as well.