← Jimmy's Jobs of the Future
Jimmy's Jobs of the Future
Anthony Scaramucci | Trump’s Ballroom, Starmer’s Strategy & The King’s Visit
00:46:52
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A
Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today we are joined by the one and only Anthony Scaramucci, the man known for spending 11 days in the White House as Director of Communications for Donald Trump. He is somewhat of a political and business superstar. So much so that when we won our Political Podcast of the Year award in January, we had a photo with him on stage. And when I sent it round, lots of people, most people's reaction was not about the award or the best interview with Tony Blair. It was, did you meet the Mooch? So it was great. He agreed that night to kind of come on the show. So big thanks to In House Lounge for sorting that amazing evening out. And a big thanks as well to the Steve Rigby team who let us record in their offices just opposite Claridge's. And you should definitely check out his podcast, the Policy Fix Boxlight Produce Show. Hence why we were able to get involved with them. A couple of other things that I wanted to mention as well today that I think people will find interesting is the British Craft Prize has launched and it is a new 60,000 pound initiative rewarding the fusion of heritage and craft with advanced technology. I think it is super exciting and I think it's going to become a really big, big deal. It's run by Louis Elton and so you can kind of check that out. It's called the British Craft Prize. We'll be talking more about it on the show. And also, I can't say what it is yet because we're releasing a day early, but the Kings Awards for Enterprise is going to have a really exciting announcement later this week, so make sure you follow me on LinkedIn where we will be discussing that and promoting it. But let's get on with today's episode. The one and only Anthony Scaramucci.
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B
The Mooch.
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C
Anthony Scaramucci, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future.
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B
It's great to be here, Jimmy. Thanks for having me in your book.
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C
Like, it was fascinating listening to that. It was basically a teacher that gave you that nickname that almost gave you your personal branding sort of 50 years ago. Right?
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B
Yeah. Alan Tepper, he was, he was hardcore. He. He took our, our multiple syllable ethnic last names and he distilled it down to one of the syllables, you know, and so he took the third syllable of my last name and I'm called the mooch for 55 years. So when the White House detractors, when I was working for Trump and they were calling me the Mooch, they thought I was like, upset about it. Like, it Was a derogatory word. I'm like, been called that since 1972. It's not that big of a deal to me. You know, go ahead, try, you know, try to get me upset.
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C
But that's one of the tips in your book as well, right. Is like whatever you are self conscious about is like, bring it up first and then people can't go at you for it.
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B
Yeah. And I think that your weaknesses are actually your strengths. But you can also be, you have to be very careful that your strengths could be your weaknesses. And I'll just tell this very quick story. Governor Romney was running for president, was a big jobs creator. And so they did an attack ad on him saying that he shut down a factory, people lost their health care. That put him on his heels. John Kerry, this is going way back. 21 years ago, 22 years ago, he was a Vietnam War veteran. George W. Bush was not. They attacked him with this ad called Swift Boat, where they had these Swift Boat veterans say that he was a coward during the war. Here's a guy that was decorated as a, as a war veteran of Vietnam. So you have to be very, very careful in life what you think your negative is. You're usually pretty good at defending. It's what you think your strength is when they start attacking your strength, that you get caught off guard. So it's just a little lesson. But I mean, look, if you go into politics, you expect to get beaten up, you know, part of it, it's part of the job. It's like if you play American football and you expect not to get a concussion, you're in the wrong game.
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C
Yeah, it's a good metaphor for it. We're halfway through the King's state visit to the usa. Okay. It seems to be going remarkably well. So I'm conscious that people listen to this in the future stuff may go wrong still. But why do you think President Trump has so much respect for King Charles?
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B
Well, I think there's a lot of layers there. Number one, he wants to be king, but he's actually from Queens. And that's an area that I'm very familiar with because I grew up on Long Island. So Trump is, down deep, he's really just a nobody, you know, and down deep, he's a bombastic, insecure showman. He's also got good political instincts. So he captured an audience of people that are unhappy with the economic situation in America. But, you know, there's not enough gold leaf on planet Earth that's going to make Trump have the class or Even the riz of King Charles. And one thing you got to say about the royal family is that they stick to it ness, you know, they're the, they're the turtle that wins the race. You know, Charles has been at this 50 plus years. His mother was at it for 75 years. And it goes all the way back for, you know, generations or, you know, millennium. And so for me, I think Trump is enamored by that. I think his mother, the fact that she was Scottish and had a love affair with the queen, I think that was also elemental of it. But ultimately, Trump respects power and prestige and he respects the standing. And it's also the king is something that Trump could never be. I think there's some of that as well.
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C
And why do you think just generally Americans love the royal family?
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B
Well, listen, I mean, I don't know what the split is here in your country between, you know, the anti royalists and the royalists, but I think from, from a distance, they, they look like gentlemen and gentle ladies, you know, from a distance, they look like people who handle themselves well. And in a culture where we don't, you know, we're this phenomenal experiment, I shouldn't exist. Jimmy, I shouldn't be talking to you. You're talking. You're like Jimmy's jobs of the future. I had a job of the Future in 1989. You know, I mean, I shouldn't be talking to you. My father was a crane operator. If you went through my genealogy in the Kingdom of Naples, and you can do that because of the Napoleonic Code, I can take you back seven generations. Where I'm from a family of day workers. I'm from a family of peasant farmers, tenant farmers. How about feudal farmers going way back into the early 1800s. And so, you know, and I'm sitting here talking to you as a product of the establishment. You know, my father was a crane operator, but I went to Tufts and Harvard and Goldman.
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C
Yeah.
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And built two successful hedge fund businesses. I mean, I failed in Washington, but I did work in the White House. And so this is a probability assessment of 0.001 may, I don't know, something very low. And so, so for us, when we see the king or we see the royal family or the monarchy, their sort of ancestral legacy, America doesn't have that sort of a culture. This is why America gets its ass kicked, by the way, every 80 or so years, because we have this very young group of people and this very young culture. And every time we lose generational memory. You know, after the Revolution. Eighty years later, we had the Civil War. Eighty years after that we had the Great Depression, which led to the Second World War. And now it's 80 years out from the Second World War. So we're going to go through it again, we're going to get dunked again. But when we look over here, you know, you're sort of like our older brothers, you know, and I thought even though the king is younger than Donald Trump, President Trump, you know, he's more the way he spoke in the Congress, the way he spoke at the state dinner last night, it's more like an older brother trying to provide some perspective. And you know, in the common Western liberalism, the common tradition and the common
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values, it is kind of crazy to think that Trump has been alive for a third of America's existence. Right.
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And he's an evil bastard. So he'll probably be alive for another 2/3. You know what I mean? I mean, the guy's probably going to die at like 200 because these evil guys, they go forever.
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C
But what are your predictions for the next two years? Right. Because we are beginning to get into the sort of era of the post Trump presidency where attention will start switching after the midterms. Like, what is your political antennae saying that, you know, what might happen over the next few years?
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Well, I mean, you know, it's going to go in a lot of different ways. But I mean, you know, the most likely way is the whatever grift has happened in the first two years will accelerate and go exponential.
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C
Yeah.
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Because his attitude will be, okay, I got two years left to rake this in. Yeah. How am I going to take the 10 billion I've made from the presidency and turn it into 50 or 100 billion?
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Yeah.
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And so that'll be one exponential thing about it. He's a retribution guy. And so he's a very small minded when you're like that. Right. And so he'll be going after people, you know, James Comey and this sort of thing, or abc, Disney, this sort of thing will also accelerate. But he's got problems. You know, he's now in a quagmire. The Iranian war is a vexing problem because you've started the war and you can't really get out of the war and he can't really declare victory and leave. That would be a substantive political victory for Iran. He can't really put ground troops in Iran. The American people are like almost at a zero in terms of support for that.
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Yeah.
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And so he's got a, he's got A, you know, he's got a hope that his blockade of their blockade stymies their economy enough where they cry uncle. Yeah, but, you know, you gotta understand their culture. And I've said this on our podcast and I'll share it with your viewers and listeners. The Iranians understand the Americans better than the Americans understand the Iranians. You know, when I was in Afghanistan, I was at our forward operating base in Gambira in October of 2015, and one of the army captains was explaining to me the culture of the warrior that we're fighting against. And they just think very, very differently than us. And so, you know, they can last longer, frankly. They can eat less, they can put up with higher gas prices, they can put up with semi starvation, and they don't have elections that they necessarily have to stand for. So it's going to be a very, very vexing problem for him, but for him, it's going to be about the grift and the attention seeking and building himself a library and some arc the Trump, you know, arc the ballroom. The ballroom and this sort of, you know, he knows he's hated. He's not stupid. I mean, everybody in his field of vision hates him.
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C
Yeah.
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You know, his family members hate him. I mean, Melania probably hates him the most. And then it goes out from there. And the members of the Congress hate him. They talk behind his back. The members of the Cabinet hate him. They all talk behind his back. I mean, they're very sycophantic to his face. But he knows that's why he's trying to build monuments to himself. He knows long after he's gone there, no one's going to be building any monuments then.
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C
Yeah. Um, and who do you think might be the players for the future presidency? Who are the people like, in Britain,
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we don't pay the obvious. The obvious players sometimes aren't obvious. Right. I mean, so, like, you know, in 2008, it was Rudy Giuliani, America's mayor, was gonna run against Hillary Clinton, and John McCain got the nomination and ran against Barack Obama. And so. But the obvious ones were, and they were literally the front runners in 2007. So we're sitting here with Marco Rubio and JD Vance on the side of the Republicans. There may be some governors that may come to play on the Republican side. And you've got guys like Pritzker, you've got guys like, you know, I would say Governor Newsom would be an obvious candidate or potential candidate, maybe Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro. So there's a Stable of people on both sides. I think Rahm Emanuel said it better than anybody. And I do think Rahm, who's a former chief of staff for Obama, former mayor of Chicago, may run as well. He said it's an open season. There's no clear front runner, in my opinion, on either side. And then what's going on on the Republican side, I think will be the most interesting because they have a death of a personality cult coming. And so I'm not saying Donald Trump will likely live forever, but his political personality is extinguishing in 2028. He probably goes lame duck at the end of 26 this year, but by the end of 2028, he's out of office. And so with that comes, I think, the death of the cult of the Trump personality political movement, which is known as maga. So I think there'll be a big intellectual civil war in that party. And so it'll have. We'll have to see what happens. You know, if the war continues to go badly, weirdly, that will help Vance.
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Right?
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Because Vance was anti the war. He's done enough leaking on Hexith and other people to try to position himself as an anti war candidate. But Trump will destroy Vance before this is over. Okay. Trump has a way of killing his young. Trump is the classic Shakespearean figure who wants to stay in power forever and doesn't like young people coming in. And he certainly wouldn't want Vance or Rubio to secede him because then he would be like, they could take potential credit for some things that he's done. He wouldn't want that. So I know this is a weird thing to say, but I'm going to say it here. He would prefer Newsom. And people always look at me. Oh, that's crazy. Oh, no, no. You have to understand Trump. So such a narcissist. He wants Jimmy. He wants to say, hey, you guys, you were nobody and you were nowhere. Yeah, you're getting roasted by Barack Obama. I showed up. I've loomed over the field for 10, soon to be 12 years, and you became somebody. When I leave, you're gonna be nobodies again. Yeah, he would love that. See that narcissistic pleasure in saying that it was all about me and nothing more about me. You see that?
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Yeah. No, no, I.
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Can you see it?
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Yeah, yeah, I can't. Do you think that we could see any of the technology entrepreneurs. Could somebody come from the outside in the way that Trump did 12 years ago now? Right. Could somebody do that again? Is that why it's partly saying, you
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know, I think, you know, somebody like Mark Cuban could do something like that. Somebody like Scott Galloway. I don't know if you know Scott.
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Yeah.
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You know, I think those guys are. They have physical presence, great verbal dexterity. They've got tons of followers. Could they rise? Stephen A. Smith, have you heard of this name?
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No.
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So Stephen A. Smith is a sportscaster on espn, but he's become very politically active. He was on the Bill Maher show recently. If you look him up, he's a very thoughtful African American man. He's a sports and business entrepreneur. He's toying with the idea of running for president. Could he be somebody? I mean, it's hard to know. You know, I think if you ask the American people, though, this is the most fascinating thing. They want to run all the bums out. You know, like, you know, what's happening right now is if you're a Republican and you're in power, they want to vote you out. Put in the Democrat.
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Yeah.
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But down deep, they really want to vote you and the Democrat out. And they want to hire Jimmy. They want to hire somebody off the street because they don't like what's going on. Do you see what I mean? So just think about it. We went from Trump to Biden, back to Trump, likely to a Democrat now. And it's only because it's a throw the bums out mentality in the United States right now.
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C
Interesting. And you famously spent 11 days in the White House and you talk in the book From Wall street to the White House and Back again about you wanted to go there for the status. Right. And actually, you realize that looking back, it was your ego that drove you there. I was just. I'm fascinated by the status point because I think we don't talk about it enough when it comes to work and jobs. It's one of the large reasons that we do all that we do. And I just wonder what your kind of reflections on it were. Because you are somebody who presents well like you. You care about certain status things. Right.
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Well, this is a very painful admission. Right. I'm basically admitting in a book that I wrote that I'm human. And what are humans? You know, we're touched by our vanity, we're touched by our egos, we're touched by our sense of pride, we're touched by our self definitions. And sometimes, unfortunately, in our lives, we want external validation to make us feel good. Right. And so let me just frame it for you. Okay. Again, it doesn't reflect well on me. But I think it's an important message for your viewers and listeners to think about because it's a very, very human and it's a very fallible message. I grew up with no money. My father and mother were blue collar. My dad was a crane operator. My mother was a makeup artist. I had good grades, you know. And so we have public schools in our country, different from your country, but they're the state schools, if you will. And I go to the public school, do well. I end up going to Tufts and then Harvard Law School. These are two good private schools. And now I'm at Goldman, which is a pillar of Wall Street's establishment, arguably one of the best firms in the world. And then I leave there, Think about the audacity of that. I leave there, start my own business, sell the business, start another business. The business does well. I'm now in the political realm as a fundraiser because it was helping me with my network. And here comes somebody that I know for 20 years. He's going to run for president. He's a fellow New Yorker and I'm having a rapport with him. The way you and I are talking very bilaterally. I was never one of the obsequious guys for Trump because we were both New Yorkers. He wins, he puts me on the transition team. And my wife hates him, like literally almost as much as Melania. So this is like, you know, Eastern European sort of ancestral hatred. My wife, I guess, got some exposure and some wind on what he's like privately and she really did not want me to go do it. So I did it anyway. So I'm going against my family. I'm doing it for the prestige. I want to fly on Air Force One, I want to work in the White House. Now I'm also self talking nonsense like, oh, I'm going to go help the people and things like that. But that wasn't really what it was. It was full on Potomac Fever. You know what Potomac Fever is? You're going to cross the river Potomac and you are going to solve people's problems. And you're a New Yorker and you're smarter than the D.C. group.
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Yeah.
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And you know what the biggest symptom of Potomac Fever is? You don't know. You have it. You know, I mean, Lutnik's got it, Bessant has it, they both have it. I could go through the list.
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Yeah.
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So I had this Potomac Fever. I'm wild eyed with this notion that I'm going to, you know, change the world.
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Yeah.
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And then I Get my ass kicked and my ass handed to me in that spot and I get my comeuppance.
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C
Yeah.
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And so in a weird way, it was a very good thing because it made me more empathetic, more psychologically minded. It made me more thoughtful. I think it also helped my, you know, when you, you have children.
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Yes.
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How many?
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Yeah, I got three, all under six.
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Okay. So you've, you've got some time here to see the development. But I, I had rising adult children at the time. Some were in college, some were out of college. And here's what I would say to you, which is, you know, again, painful. The kids don't listen to what you say, but they watch what you do. And so it was very important for me to pull myself out of that moment. I'm fired from the White house unceremoniously, after 11 days. I'm mocked on social media. I'm destroyed by late night comedians. And the United States, perhaps around the world, cable news, pundits, editorialists, they're just eviscerating me. So what am I going to do? Am I going to be a baby? Am I going to play the victim?
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C
Yeah.
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Am I going to walk around with my head creaked and do what the scarecrow did in the wizard of Oz, blame it on everybody else? Or am I going to own it, be accountable for it and show my kids that you can make colossal mistakes in judgment, or you can be human, you can be fallible and frail, and you can survive it. And so that's what I tried to do, let me tell you, was the hardest part of my career. I mean, it looks easier in hindsight because it's nine years ago already, Jimmy. But let me tell you, just imagine, I am fired from the White House. My wife has filed for divorce on me. We've reconciled. Thankfully, I missed the birth of my son. Okay. He was born on the 24th of July. I was in West Virginia at the Boy Scouts event with Donald Trump. There was a 60 mile no fly zone around the President's aircraft. Air Force One, okay? I can't get back to New York even if my wife wanted me there. Can't get back there. And there I am getting roasted. And of course, I'm now fighting with him because there's things that he wants to do which I am not equipped to do, you know, like I'm taking the job seriously. I did go to law school. I did read the Constitution and took a course on constitutional law. I don't want to do the things that he wants to do. I Want to follow the precepts of the Constitution. I remember, you know, I got fired on a Monday, but on Friday, Trump was yelling at me, telling me I was a deep stater. And I'm like, I haven't even. I've been to Washington, like, one time on a field trip. How could I be a deep stater? You know? But he was mad at me because I'm like, hey, this is the institution of the presidency. This is the people's house. It's not your house. I mean, he's putting up all kinds of ambulance and stuff. I always teach people say, hey, man, somebody putting a $400 million renovation on their house, they're not expecting to leave in two years. You gotta be thinking about that. Right.
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C
But what do you think? How do you think status has changed in the workplace since you're, you know, you've been working four decades now, Right. Like, it's interesting, you talk about turning up at Goldman's in the polyester suit, etc, and these sort of little things matter. And I think when you're at the start of your career, you can't notice what these things are until you've been through it.
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Yeah. But also, you know, when you grow up like I did, I mean, I didn't know any better. I hadn't worn a polyester suit because it's really all I get afforded work. Yeah. I remember the Goldman partner saying, hey, man, you're a smart kid, but we gotta get you. You're like, fully flammable for this job interview. We gotta get you in some natural fiber clothing, you know, And I remember being so embarrassed about it, you know, but, but here's, here's. I think this is the big thing about the changes. I think it's gotten a little fairer for women. But again, you know, I'm gonna be brutally honest. It's still unfair for women. Still a man's world.
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Yeah.
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At least in the American workplace at the white collar level, if we're really being honest, okay. We look at the metrics and we look at the pay, it's gotten better. And there's a lot of women in these roles that do amazing jobs. And I think they've gotten a fairer shake now. Thank God. I mean, when I started, Coleman's actor was one woman partner. I mean, you think about the magnitude, no African American partners or anything like that. And so it's gotten a little fairer. It's got a little bit more open. I think it's gotten a little bit more flexible. I think Covid Also pushed that on us. You know, you could find me at home one or two days during the week. It doesn't mean I'm working less hard. It's just that I may be able to do more of my meetings from my house, which may save me some commuting time. And maybe, weirdly, I may be able to add more things to my schedule as a result of not the two hour commute in the car somewhere.
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C
So how does the Anthony Scaramucci operating system break down? Right, because you're fully versed in what's going on in politics, but also the media and the markets as well. What does the sort of like, start of the Anthony Scaramucci day look like?
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B
Well, I'm a big reader. You know, Buffett once said that if you're reading 50 hours a week, you're ahead of everybody else. And, you know, I don't know if I could say that with confidence, but am I reading 30 to 40 hours a week? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So I'm working around my reading and so. And I have pretty good retention skill set. So when I'm reading something, a pretty good chance I can assimilate it, digest it, and potentially apply it. The things that are going on. Yeah. And so that would be, number one. Number two, I'm a decent delegator. If you're going to have a job like mine, you've got to be confident in your delegating skills. You know, Reagan, President Reagan had a great line on it, this little bronze plaque, it said, you can get anywhere you want in life as long as you don't care who gets the credit. So I have people running our money. I have people working on our conference business. I have people working on research, both political research and economic research and digital asset research related to things like Bitcoin. So we've hired a group of people that are very, very capable, very young, and the goal is to make them capable of taking my job. Yeah, okay. And so empowering them, I think, is very important. So if you looked at my day. Right. I always tell people this. I got this from Steve Covey. Remember the, the book, the 7 Habits of the Very Successful People? I don't know if that's exactly the book or the highly influential people, but he talked about your time as a jar. And you've got rocks and you got sand, and the rocks are the most important things. You got to put those in the jar first. Yeah, you put those in the jar first and the sand will fit around the rocks. If you put all the stuff in that's not as important. It fills up and then you can't get the rocks in. Right. It's a good metaphor for life. Right. So I, I always step back. Okay. So what's important to me. Well, what's important to me is I gotta spend time with the people that are working at Skybridge. What's important to me, I've gotta make sure that our clients are in a good communication with the firm.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Compliance is a very big part of our industry. We're one of the most regulated, other than food and drug securities in the United States is probably the top regulated industry in the country. So we have to make sure that we're very cautious and over aggressive on compliance and regulation. So I spend some time on that and then, then I shave off some time for the podcast. You know, there's a guy, and hopefully he's listening to this. I'm looking right at you, Tony Pastor, the head of Goal Hanger, who told me, oh, you do this podcast, it's one hour a week, Jimmy. You know it's not one hour a week. Right? You're laughing, you know, so you gotta do some research. You gotta get spared. You know, I was supposed to do this podcast in your studio, but I had three hours of podcasting I was doing at the Claridge's hotel. I couldn't get over there. Right. So, you know, you know, it creeps into things and then you have to build some time for your family.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So I'm, I'm here in London, landed at 7.30am I got to the hotel, showered, shaved, got the suit on, had a meeting, did three hours of podcasting, came to see you. Now I'm going to go to Bloomberg. After Bloomberg, I'm meeting a client and then after that I'm going to a 60 person dinner where I'll be making a presentation. I'm going to go back to Claridge's, sleep for a few hours and take the 8:20 flight back to New York.
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C
Wow. Okay, that is.
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B
Let's go, man.
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C
That's quite.
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B
You ready? Okay, let's go. Okay. You gotta, you gotta be, you gotta be lit up and ready for work. And you gotta do your work with passion and enthusiasm. And so you better pick something that you really like. And in the immortal words of Mel Brooks, who's one of my spiritual advisors, he's 99 years young, he's coming out with a sequel to Spaceballs and the American comedian Mel Brooks. What would he say? Jimmy, relax, none of us are getting out of here. Alive. You know that and I know that, and we're borrowing everything. So take a chill. Whatever your worries are, 100 years from now, you're not going to have those worries. Trust me. So take a chill. You'll figure it out.
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C
And how well do you think your personal brand that's been built through podcasting, et cetera, has allowed you to hire better people?
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B
Yes. Yeah, I don't think I'm meeting you if I don't have that. I think the weird thing about the Trump thing, as horrible as that was for me, and I'm not gonna. I'm not one of these guys that's gonna come on your podcast and say, this was the greatest thing that happened to me. I got my ass kicked in the White House. No, it was a brutal thing, but one of the silver linings of it is it gave me a platform to speak out, and it also gave me a platform of understanding, so I'm able to explain to people what's really going on, as opposed to the nonsense from the circumference. And so. And so for those reasons, you know, I'm grateful.
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C
What is Trump's best quality?
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Well, he's. He's got very good political instincts. Let's talk about some of the. Some of his analytical skills.
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C
He.
- [30:06]
B
He's not a intellectually curious person in terms of being a reader, but he's very smart. People that think he's not smart, they don't understand him. It's like Richard Branson once said to me about Donald Trump. If he's got ADHD and dyslexia. I'm not saying he has those things, but if he does, you can still have a very high iq. You just make up for it in other ways. You know, if you're blind, you can hear better.
- [30:29]
C
Yeah.
- [30:30]
B
Maybe if you're deaf, you can see better. If you can't read, well, then you got to pick up the people in the room.
- [30:35]
C
Yeah.
- [30:35]
B
You got to figure out who in the room you can, you know, use as a leverage point to help you with your career. You see what I mean?
- [30:42]
C
Yeah.
- [30:43]
B
And also, I think you end up taking more exogenous risks where he's had some abysmal failure, which, frankly, I can relate to. But he's also had some incredible success. And so he's taking more risks than somebody that's differently equipped than him from a cognitive point of view. And so I would say he is gregarious, he is charming. People don't think he's charming and gregarious, and they don't know how he got to the presidency. If he came through the door right now, even though him and I are always fighting, he would be very gregarious and very disarming and very charming. You know, he blasts Newsom.
- [31:21]
C
Yeah.
- [31:21]
B
Calls him new scum, all kinds of stuff. He'll see him on the tarmac, he'll say, gavin, are we good? You and I were good. You know, he'll destroy John Carl, who's one of the ABC White House correspondents, and then I'll pick up the phone and call him, say, john. Yeah. That was, you know, that was really just for the. That was just for that camera. Are we good? That's Trump. You gotta understand that about him. He also doesn't like people standing up to him, but he respects it. So he calls Carney for sure, more than any other Western leader, guaranteed.
- [31:57]
C
Yeah.
- [31:57]
B
He's on the phone with Carney all the time because, number one, he wants to win Carney's approval because Carney's blasting him.
- [32:03]
C
Yeah.
- [32:04]
B
And number two, he respects Carney for blasting him. He laughs. Like when he's sitting at a table like this and those people are going around and they're telling him that he's a naked guy sitting there, but his clothing is so beautiful.
- [32:15]
C
Yeah.
- [32:15]
B
It's like vomiting in his mouth. I know the guy. He's not into that. He wants him to do it because he wants people. He wants to show people. He's like, literally. I mean, this is literally. He could come back up onto the campaign plane from some sycophant venturism. And you look at me, goes, can you believe these guys? How they're talking to me with, like. I mean, literally, like, mocking derision.
- [32:39]
C
Do you think Keir Starmer might have gone up in his estimations then over the last six weeks or so?
- [32:45]
B
No question. You know, Keir Stormer has to differentiate himself from Donald Trump. He tried the obsequious approach. Now he's gravitating towards the Carney approach. And that's going to help him politically here. It's also going to help him with Trump. Yeah. Hey, man, I'm not taking your BS Also, you know, the King and Keir Starmer, they got Trump to apologize. You know how hard it is to get Trump to apologize? I think he's apologized to two people. He apologized to his wife after the grab him by the you know what tape. Okay. And I think he apologized to the original Pocahontas for calling Senator Warren Pocahontas. He said, I probably shouldn't have done that to Pocahontas, I was making a joke. But to apologize to the British veterans that fought alongside of the Americans in the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars as well as World War II. I mean, you know, this guy's not a guy that apologizes. So I give Keir Stormer credit for that, and I give King Charles credit for that.
- [33:45]
C
Interesting.
- [33:47]
B
He's not a good guy, Jimmy. Okay. He's just not a good guy. Okay. There's not a lot of great qualities about Donald Trump, you know?
- [33:56]
C
What advice are you giving to your kids? Because they. Your younger kids are what, 12 and 16.
- [34:02]
B
12 and 8. So I have. My. My kids are 34. 30, 26, 12 and 8.
- [34:08]
C
So you've lived through quite a bit of careers advice and so on. And I know what you said earlier about your kids don't. Any kids don't listen, but they copy and emulate.
- [34:17]
B
Yeah. So I had to get up. You get your ass kicked the way I got my ass kicked in July of 2017. You got to get up for any reason. You gotta go for yourself for sure. You can't let your kids know that you're a quitter. You gotta get up, you gotta finish, man. Yeah. You know, but for my kids, I always tell my kids the same thing. You're renting everything. This is a temporary thing. God's your travel agent. A lot of things have already been picked out for you. Okay? I mean, trust me, the Scaramucci would like to be six feet, okay? Or as you guys say, two meters, but we're not. Okay? So you gotta go through your life and a lot of things have already been picked out for you. Your eye color, your skin color, location of your birth, who your parents are. You know, you didn't choose your school when you were six. Your parents chose it for you.
- [35:03]
C
Yeah.
- [35:03]
B
So a lot of things are already picked out for you. And so you have to accept that part of life as well. You have to accept the good parts, the blessings, but also the tribulations of your life. And if you're able to do that, then dial into something that you really like. This is about the jobs of the future. I would say to your listeners, this is about your job. This is about the jobs of passion. There's something right now. There's a kid watching. There's a 25 year old watching your show. I don't know what they were doing at age 13, but they should think about it. So my kid was making Lego stop Action videos. He's always wanted to be in the film industry. Yeah. So I'm his dad. Okay? I'm not one of those dads. Well, I'm a lawyer. You need to be a lawyer and all that nonsense. You're visiting. You want to be in the film industry? Let me help you get into the film industry. My older son's always been in attack. He's been into biotech and he's got tremendous math skills. He went to Stanford Business School. He has a venture fund, and I'm helping him with it, but he's really running it. And he's had. In some ways, he's made me richer. You know, he's helped me. You know, he's got me in anthropic and some of these other investments.
- [36:18]
C
You know, I think that was working well. Right?
- [36:20]
B
Yeah. My daughter is a professional singer and actress. I told her, that's what you want to do, go do it.
- [36:25]
C
Yeah.
- [36:25]
B
And when you don't want to do that anymore, stop doing it. Every one of your viewers and listeners should YouTube the Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford University commencement address. The guy's dying of cancer, okay? He's on borrowed time. He invented Apple. And everything that you're doing now is tied to some invention that he came up with. The smartphone, et cetera.
- [36:52]
C
The podcast.
- [36:52]
B
The podcast, everything. Okay. And you know, the ipod. Remember the ipod? This is the guy. And what is he saying? Man, I'm leaving. I got no choice. Whether you believe in God or the universe, whatever. You believe in God, Bass. A thousand. Okay, there's 100. If you Google this number or you ask Claude or Chad GBG how many humans have lived on Earth, it's going to give you an estimate, about 109 billion. Okay. Okay. Anybody get out of here alive? Nobody? Even Christ, you know? Okay. He came back from the dead, but he ascended into heaven. Right. He's gone, too. So no one gets out of here alive. So when you think about the jobs of the future, don't go for the job that you think is cool. Don't go for the status job. Go for the job you're going to love. I'm 62 years young. I'm not 62 years old. I'm getting up in the morning, ready to go, and that's the job that you want.
- [37:51]
C
Would you go back to the White House? What job would you like to do if you went back?
- [37:56]
B
I would. Yeah. I need one more day in the White House. Can I just look into the camera, make a public service announcement? If you're out there, you're running for president. I'll wash dishes I'll dust. I just need to get to an even dozen days in the White House. Would that be okay for everybody? Just want one extra day.
- [38:13]
C
I thought you'd say Treasury Secretary. I know you did the April Fools about running for president.
- [38:17]
B
No, listen, I'm not equipped for it. You have to know what your calling is in life. You gotta lie, lie, lie. Okay, I don't want to do that. Okay. I don't want to do that for my own soul. I don't want to do that for my children. I don't want to do that for my. You, you, you run for office. You got to start the process of wackadoodle lying. Okay. Which makes your podcast successful. My podcast with real people telling people what we think. You know, I don't want to do that. But having said that, I'm writing a book about how we got to all of this populism and there's ways to get out of it and I would like to be part of the solution based processes and policies of that. Hopefully, depending on who wins, I'll have a voice in some of that.
- [39:05]
C
I can imagine that final question you asked Bill Gurley this on your podcast, which I thought was really interesting and insightful. What's more important, talent or peer group?
- [39:16]
B
And what do you say?
- [39:18]
C
Well, he sort of argued that it's both.
- [39:21]
A
Right?
- [39:21]
C
It's classic nature nurture question. In some ways, I think, I think peer group can be the biggest.
- [39:27]
B
But go back and listen to it. He did. You gotta be talented, but you really are the weighted average of the five people you hang out with. And that's ultimately what Bill said on the podcast. And this what I would share with you and I would tell your kids or people listening, hang out with great people. Because if you hang out with great people, they're going to lift you. If you hang out with idiots, they're going to sink you. Okay? And so yes, you got to have talent, you got to show up with your talent, but you also got to recruit and train and you got to hang out with great people and you got to hang and you can't be insecure. I have a partner who is my president, chief operating officer. We've known each other for 40 years. He's been my business partner twice on two different occasions. Worked together at Goldman, went to law school together. He is so much better than me at so many different things. And rather than be upset at that, be like, thank God for that and don't be a bottleneck. You know what a bottleneck is? You're running the thing. And every decision has to come through you. Right now I'm sitting here in London talking to you. There's been 20 decisions made at Skybridge. I don't even know what the hell they are. Tonight I'll give somebody a call, they'll say, yeah, this happened and that happened and we went left, right, left, left, left. Or someone will call me and say, well, yeah, we went left and the whole thing blew up on us. Now what do you want to do? Okay, well, what did you learn from it and how are we going to get out of it? But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna. And this is something Trump does, which I hate. Okay. You know, Trump is about all the credit's on me. He actually says it publicly and people laugh. But he really does mean it. You know, he's advanced going over there. If he gets a peace deal, I'm taking all the credit. If he does, he's getting all the blame. Trump really does think like that. Yeah, you gotta be the opposite of that.
- [41:18]
C
Where did you meet the COO again? Was that Goldman?
- [41:21]
B
Did you say law school? We went to Goldman together. We then left, started a business, we sold the business. He became the deputy mayor of the city of Los Angeles. And then when I was coming back into Skybridge after my abysmal firing from Washington, I brought him back, brought him into the firm with me.
- [41:41]
C
Interesting.
- [41:42]
B
He's back as my partner the last nine years.
- [41:45]
C
What's. I know you're on avid reader for somebody in their early 20s beginning to make their way in the world. What's one or two books that you particularly recommend apart from your own, which is genuinely is 20 bits of advice is very good.
- [41:58]
B
Well, I, you know, listen, I mean, these are basic books, but these are so important. These are foundational books. So you have to read the Richest man in Babylon if you want to be rich, you have to read that book. And it'll take you an hour and 20 minutes, two hours to read the book. And it's a parable that George Clason wrote 100 years ago about how to think about wealth. And the number one thing in the book is to pay yourself first. So care. If you have a 20 quid job, you pick the number. Say I have $100,000 a year job. Well, you got to give yourself $10,000 a year. Yeah, it's got to go into a savings account, an etf. It's got to go into stocks, Bitcoin. And if you do that consistently over 10 years, you're going to have an nest egg. You do that consistently over 40 years. You're going to be independent, you're going to be financially independent. And so you have to have discipline in your life to pay yourself first. If you read James Clear's book about atomic habits, guess what? You got to get up and do 10 push ups and 20 squats. And then maybe the next day it'll be 30 pushups and 50 squats. You got to do it. Yeah, you got to force yourself to do it. So these are, these are foundational books. But if you want to read a really good philosophical book, then you read Meditations and you read about the great general Marcus Aurelius, who was writing in his diary, and he wasn't expecting anybody to read it. And he told the slave, because, yes, he did have slaves. He said, burn this, I'm dying. But he taught the slave how to read. And the slave read it and said, this is incredible. I can't burn this. I have to replicate this. And it's a treatise on accepting change, and it's a treatise on accepting your mortality in momento morte. In this moment, I can die. And when you do that, you can release a lot of your fears and a lot of your anxiety. You know, the Lao Tzu, the ancient philosopher, said, if I worry too much, I have anxiety. And if I think about my past too much, I have depression. Because I made mistakes. Of course I made mistakes. I don't wake up in the morning and kick myself in the pants because I failed at the White House. I've forgiven myself long ago. You got to let your past go because a lot of things went right or wrong and some of it was out of your control. So if you worry too much about or think too much about your past, you get depression. If you think too much about your future, you get anxiety. So what do the Lao Z live in the present. Yeah, live in the present. That's where you'll find your home. That's where you'll find your happiness. You know, I had a coffee this morning. I'm talking to you. I did do the squats and the push ups since I got to the hotel. Brushed my teeth, took a shower. I mean, life is good. Yeah, I did a few other things in the hotel room, but we'll leave that on the cutting room floor. But you know what I'm talking about, right?
- [44:50]
C
Thanks so much for coming on. Jimmy's job is the future sa.