Anthony Scaramucci, Founder of Skybridge Capital | What's The New American Dream?

Thank you so much for joining me on the success story podcast where we speak with incredible leaders and mentors and unpack their story. Very excited today to be sitting down with Anthony Skarmucci now. If you have been living under a rock, Anthony Skarmucci has a numerous amount of accolades behind them. He's the founder, co-managing partner of Skybridge Capital. He's the author of four books. He has several incredible rankings, including the number, number 85, on Worst Magazine, most powerful people in the world of global finance. In 2011, he received Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year Award. And obviously, he's somewhat famous for being the, and serving as the White House communication director for a period in July of 2017. So Anthony, thank you so much for joining me. You know, I really appreciate it. And I just want to, you know, get a little bit of where you've come from and what sort of led you to, you know, the resume you have today. Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me on. And you're being very kind. You could have mentioned that I got fired from the White House after 11 days, although I'm assuming a lot of people would have already known that. But, you know, the good news is, three years later in hindsight, it looks like it was actually a helpful to my career as opposed to as damaging as I thought it was going to be at that moment. But so my, my origin story, I guess, is fairly typical of people that grew up in a blue collar family on Long Island. I think I, I got lucky in the sense that I went to a very good public high school, had high grades there, high test scores, ended going, ended up going to Tush University, which was a little struggle for my family because my dad was an hourly worker and we figured it out through a couple of jobs during the summer and obviously, you know, student debt and different things like that. But I did well at Tush, ended up going to Harvard Law School after Tush and then my career started at Goldman Sachs where I spent seven years in private banking. I left Goldman Sachs at age 32, which is, you know, when you're talking about people's success orcs, there's a great line about entrepreneurs from Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. He said, if I knew how goddamn hard it was, I never would have done it. And so, but entrepreneurs do that sort of stuff. And so I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, always wanted to have my own business. So I left Goldman making reasonably good to great money there. And I started my business with a gentleman by the M. Andy Bozart in December of 1996. And we got quite lucky, you know, the markets were in a roaring bull market. We frankly made a lot of mistakes, but there's an expression on Wall Street, don't confuse brains with a bull market. And so the market sort of carried us up. We did very, very well. We got a hiccup in a shock in 1998 with the long-term capital management crisis powered through that. You know, the current pandemic, you know, I'm, I'm into by ninth crisis on Wall Street. So I've seen this movie, it comes out in varying forms over the years, but we had a crisis in 98. We ended up selling our business about four weeks after 9-11 in 2001. We sold to a firm called Newburger Berman. Newburger then got bought by Lehman Brothers. I worked there for a few years. And then in March of 2005, I set up Skybridge Capital where I have been less the 11 days in the White House. This has been my sort of primafaceia responsibility. We've got 10 and a half billion dollars under management. We're basically an integrated fund of funds platform for high-net worth individuals. And we also have a pension advisory business. So that is in a nutshell, my career, I've done some fun things as well. You know, I launched the Skybridge Salt Conference in 2009 coming out of the last crisis. I thought that was a great idea to start to reconnect people. So that's been a 10-year-old conference. I'm fortunate we couldn't have it this year. I had a cancel it because of the Bellagio Hotel where we typically have it as closed. And so unfortunately, we couldn't get the conference done this year. But that's also been a lot of fun. And then I did something really neat for your Wall Street aficionados that listen to you. I bought the right to Lewis Rookisers Wall Street week from Maryland Public Broadcasting. And I put that on the air. Nobody wanted it. And so I did it as an infomercial. And then I sold advertising. I bought 30 minutes of advertising on a Sunday morning from Fox Channel 5 in New York. And then I subsold advertising to my friends and colleagues and financial services. And then the Fox Business Channel picked that up. When I went to go work for Mr. Trump as one of his executives in the transition committee, I sold that to the Fox Business Channel. So it's been a fun career. I got into politics very accidentally. I would say that when I came out of law school, I didn't really have a big network. Didn't know a lot of people that weren't wearing what I would call greenies. That was my father's outfit when he went to go work. And so I didn't have a white collar experience. So I got myself involved in politics, wrote my first check to a politician in 1989 to Rudolph Giuliani. How about that young successfully ran for mayor in 1989, but I was out there as a young Republican raising money and it helped open up a lot of doors for me. I love I love the story. And what I love about your story is is the diversity. And I think that a testament to why you have been successful and not like really not just blowing smoke is seriously because you just go after things. Like you know, I didn't bring up the 11 days in White House. I think most people are aware of that, but I wanted to let you tell your story because I think that even just jumping into that is very admirable because there's not a lot of people that would feel comfortable just stepping into a position like that coming from really not a lot of political background. So what like what makes you jump into something? How do you evaluate opportunities? What sort of pushes you in new directions that you've obviously done repeatedly over the course of your career? Well, I would say specifically to the White House job, that was a little bit too much idealism and I didn't really understand the world of politics. I would say that unfortunately, you know, my parents are great people. They're still alive thank God, but they were not well educated and we didn't have a very good understanding about how the real corporate world or the real political world works. And for your listeners, you can't read that in a book. You can't read a history book and say, okay, now I have a good sense for how Washington works. You can't read about Goldman Sachs and say, okay, now I know how that works. And so for me, a lot of the stuff that's happened to me in my life has been a series of trial and error. I went to Goldman Sachs, my first job interview, I was in like 100% polyester. I bought the suit from Sy Simms. I think my shirt was 100% poly. I mean, I was fully flammable at my first job interview. And so the guy basically was very nice. He's like, look, you're a smart kid, but you're the worst dressed person that we met at the Harvard Law School. And so I had to make that adaptation and I had to go buy a real suit before I went down for my call back interview. I would say in the world of politics, I was reasonably good as a fundraiser, but I was absolutely terrible as a political operative because I didn't really understand the lack of morals, the lack of screw bowls, the ridiculous backstabbing. I mean, I did watch the House of Cards, but I didn't realize that they had the House of Cards screenwriters get together with the Hunger Games screenwriters. That wasn't enough, so they added a little bit of VEEP and then they threw in the Game of Thrones. And all of a sudden, they shook all that up and you got all this nasty, crazy nonsense. So I was ill prepared for that and so I would tell people, you know, if you're a political fundraiser, you're probably not the best suited to work inside the White House. You're probably going to need to have some Washington like establishment experience or be the president, some law, something like that because it's not the right fit. But, you know, to your point, I've thrown myself in the things that really don't have any choice. If I wanted to be successful and wanted to live some level of the arc of the American dream, what do you got to do? You got to start your own business, you got to create a clientele, you got to manage and recruit very solid employees, you got to think creatively, you got to expect that the stuff that you're doing is not going to go well. You know, Mike Tyson says, yeah, everybody has a plan and they get punched in the face. So I just want you to imagine my business in 2008, it was three years old, Skybridge Capital. We're going through the financial crisis where the U.S. markets are taken down 55% and we're sitting there with a brand new business three years old. How did I retool it, how did I change it from what it originally was going to be? And so what I would say to people is, you've got to be adaptive, you've got to be fluid, you've got to recognize that your life is a series of plans and reason why God put an eraser on the end of a pencil is you got to erase those plans and go into re drafting constantly. Even today with the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic, you know, our business is suffering, but you know, guess what, four billion other people have had this sort of transition and dislocation, so the number of people that live in the northern hemisphere of planet earth. And so everybody, we're a good 75% of those people have had some level of disruption in their lives. So I would tell people, it's your attitude that's going to make or break your life and your career. And so, you know, attitude, not to sound cliche, but it always starts out with gratitude. You know, I wake up in the morning and say, okay, not the richest, probably not, obviously not the smartest. Like, ah, good things going for me, how am I going to look at today in the most positive way possible so that I can lead my company, inspire people that are working with me and also, you know, reach into and magnetize my clients that want to be with Skybridge through its ups and downs, whatever those ups and downs may be. And so, but I think the big learning lesson is that, you know, it takes a long time to turn yourself into a success, you know, that cliche that an overnight success is 15 years. I think that's basically true. And so, you just got to stay at something and never quit. I find that the people that have lackluster careers or they have mediocre things they meander and they try to day trade their careers, not going well, okay, let me get out of this thing and let me flip into something else. Oh, wait a minute, that's not going well, okay, let me flip into something else. Well, the truth of the matter is things go up and down. I mean, they don't, they don't always go well and it's the way you grind yourself forward when things are not going well that are ultimately going to define your career. And of course, you look, you always get gum waivers in a crisis. I mean, I'm always, I never know who they're going to be, but, you know, when you're in the okay corral and you're ready to draw guns and you got to shoot the other guy in the head. I always watch like during a crisis like this or the markets are in crisis, you always get gun waivers, you know, in a crisis, they start waving the gun, they can't hit the target, they get nervous, they get upset, but, you know, I tell my, my friends and colleagues and my clients, hey, I started with absolutely nothing. If I got to go back to a white t-shirt in a one room apartment with a rabbit ear television and a six pack of slits watching the Metz, I am just fine. I have no problem doing that if that's where I have to go. And if you start thinking like that, you can be way more clear headed about your decisions. I think that I like that analogy a lot because I think that you get to the point and you, it's funny because people do get to success at some point in their career and you hit on like a ton of good points and they're not going to just rehash them all. But yeah, you spend enough time doing something, you will be successful. You see the people that hash something out for 10 years, they're generally doing pretty well. But I think the concept that it's okay to fail even after a certain point of time committed, like if you have that personality that's like, you know, you're just going to nose to the grind, so I'm going to keep going. Like it doesn't matter what happens at the end of the day. And I think that there's a lot of fear and a lot of fear mongering that leads to people stressing for no good reason and it's almost like having these knee jerk reactions. And it hurts obviously everybody, but it hurts when it's like the leaders that are having these knee jerk reactions to their businesses and, you know, furlowing their entire organization or whatnot. And it just causes, it causes more stress and anxiety and I'm sure you notice it. Like when I walk to the grocery store, for example, now there's no, I'm in Toronto. Ontario, Canada is actually doing quite well in the Paris into the US right now, like marginal amount of cases, but you walk to the grocery store and people are just aggressive and stressed out. I really like everyone just has to chill out a little bit because things will be better, but I like the way you put it. Like if you're okay building yourself back up, you'll be fine. That's really good. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I think I think that's the point. You know, I don't know anybody and I'm sure you're interviewing a lot of people. And if someone's coming on, I would love to meet the person says, Hey, you know, my life started out great. I was born under a rainbow. There was a part of gold there. My parents were completely functional. They did everything perfectly as I was raised. Then I got perfect grades in school and I went on and started my career and my career went up in a trajectory of 45 degrees to greatness. And that's, that's my life, you know, Michael Dell helped me get my business started at Skybridge. He was one of my earliest investors and he said something to me that I will never forget and it's worth repeating here. And he said, you know, Anthony, I had to make 8,000 decisions when the business got started in 1984 through probably 1992 and make 8,000 decisions and I had to go, you know, 7,900 for 8,000. Yeah, of course, it makes some bad decisions, but I had to really make a lot of really good decisions for Dell computer to become what it ultimately became because, you know, there was a gateway back then, there was compact, there were other mail order computer companies, but Dell smiced it all of them. And there were a lot of different things that went wrong for him, you know, he, he had a laptop that was catching fire is 1993 product cycle, stock went down 70% and the, the company needed equity capital and a convertible bond to help at Greece establish its products cycle. And so, you know, I helped them get that done in 1993 and of course, he went off to the races from there, but there's a guy, one of the richest people in the world, an amazing guy and obviously built an unbelievable global brand, but there's a guy who, you know, was on his knees and brought himself back from the darkness and, and, you know, Bill Gates, you know, look, he's a amazing guy, arguably one of the richest, at one point, the richest person in the world, but for his charitable giving. And he had a hard time getting that business up and running. He, he failed in the operating system, he borrowed $30,000 from his dad, he bought digital research's operating system, it was called DR Das, he made him in Paul Allen, made some changes to it and, and rebranded MS Das and the rest of his three, he goes on to become the monopolist for the operating systems of most of the hardware in the world. So my point is that you, you, you, you can't look at your life and expect it to happen a certain way, you have to say, okay, I'm going to be successful no matter what and I'm going to keep plugging. And no matter how many times I'm told no, you know, just remember this, no spelled backwards is on. Somebody's telling me no, it's turning me on. I'm not sitting there saying, oh, wow, the guy said, no, I feel rejected. Let me go put my head in cold water. Let me put my sheet over my head. I'm not going to get up tomorrow morning. I just got rejected by somebody. I'm like, what are you kidding me on the, let me make another 15 calls and life is also a statistical outcome. And I don't want to use a baseball analogy, but I think it's appropriate. So I'm going to use it anyway. If you go three for ten in baseball, you bet 300. And if you do that consistently, you can make it to the whole thing. You only have to have 30% of the time you're at the play, you get a hit. But the great thing about business, you have unlimited at bats. So in an example, like if you're a great salesperson and you're going one for ten and my suck is a salesperson and I'm going five for five thousand. I'm five times better than you. The point being is that like that persistence, that doggedness, that intensity is going to power you through, even if you're not the most talented person. But that person going one for ten in sales, that's amazing. I'm five for five thousand, the average is suck, but I'm five times better than the guy that's not trying. Does that make sense? It makes a ton of sense. Now, the attitude, like your attitude is 100%, like we're aligned and what it takes to be successful. Now I'm curious, I'm sure I know the answer to this, but you had the same attitude going into your career as the White House communications director. What did you discover working in that administration? Because you mentioned like it wasn't, you couldn't prepare yourself for it. It wasn't like what you knew before. So what did you sort of unearthed in? Well, yeah, I was completely out of my element. I didn't have it, frankly, I didn't, there was an expression of Washington, you know, of Harry Truman said, if you want a friend in Washington by a dog, because you don't have any friends in Washington, you know, in business totally different, you do have friends in Washington, it's all about that individual's interest and it's all about what are they going to do to achieve that interest and if they have to stab you in the eyeball while they're smiling at you, they're going to do that, you know, and that's Washington. And so for me, the president asked me to be his OPL director. And so that was a really good job for me. That's the office of Public Liaison. I would have been his chief networking officer. And so I talked it over to my wife. She didn't want me to take it. I mean, she probably hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. I mean, I don't think she hates him as much as Melania, but it's like right at the top there, you know. And so she didn't want me to go anywhere near the guy. And I said, no, he's the president of the United States and I'm a Republican. He's asking me to do this. So I'm going to go, I'm going to go and do it. And then, you know, Ryan's previous and Steve Bannon, for whatever reason, they did not want me in that job. And so they started, rather than just saying, you know, Ryan's previous could have just said to me, hey man, I hate your guys, I don't want you in that job. From the White House chief to staff, I would have said, okay, that's cool. I'm not even going to come to Washington. I'll just stay at Skybridge, but they did all this obfuscation. And then they did a op-o drop on me. What's an op-o drop? They dropped a story in the press, insinuating that when I put my company up for sale, I was selling it to China because I was going to become this de facto like secret agent for China and become their lobbyist inside the administration. Just like total nonsense, right? So that's all crazy because I mean, that's what they do in Washington. So, so then I got on the phone with the president. I said, hey, these two guys suck, I'm just letting you know, they're very bad guys. At some point, you're going to want to get rid of them. I got the fact that they've knocked me out of this job. No problem. But let me just say this, if you are getting, you know, tired of them, which I predict you will, give me a call, I'll take care of it for you. And so, it all happened very quickly. He called me, next thing you know, I get named as the communications director. And I said to the president, that's not the best job for me, you know, the other job would be better. Well, that job is open, it's available, it's in the West Wing, come work here. And there was a degree of impetuousity there. I would say this to your listeners, don't let your pride and your ego get into your decision making. Don't let it get in the way of your decision making. And so, what happened to me is previous and ban and blocked the job. I put my ego in it. The president called me to go take those two guys out. And so, I went in there with a vengeance and I made a lot of mistakes while I was there. And I didn't build enough of a coalition and I didn't, I was too trusting. And so, I got on the phone with a reporter, I made a joke about Ryan's previous and Steve sat down and he recorded it, he ran to CNN with it. I thought it was off the record, he said it wasn't okay, big deal. And so, that embarrassed the president and then John Kelly fired me. And so, but, you know, the good news is I got previous and ban and out of there. So, I think that was like a great service to America, especially with ban and I mean, you never met a more, you know, wacko, I mean, with the whole nationalism and the white national ethno-centrism and a lot of the non-taste that he, I'm Canadian. And so, it comes over here, I don't hear it as much as you do and but I still hear it. Yeah, I mean, thank God. I mean, I mean, I think if I, if I've made any contribution to the American society or the Western canon of liberalism in my short stay in the White House, when my suicide vest was going off, it knocks the ban and it depends of any avenues. So, I think that was an accomplishment for mankind or humankind, but the point being, I had my ego in there, I had my pride in there. I made a foolish mistake of trusting somebody they used that against me. I got to merrily fired and so for me, I was like, okay, no problem. That's 100% my fault. I'm fully accountable for it. John Kelly and I have actually become close friends thereafter. And I tried to stay loyal to the president, but when he continues on the path of what he was doing, it was like impossible to stay loyal. If you have a rational point of view about life and you're listening to the nonsense and you're watching the Twitter screens and you're listening to all the lies and you're listening to the confusion and the mismanagement of the executive branch. And you know, Michael Lewis really wrote about it in his book. He wrote a very, very interesting book about the, I guess it's called the third or fifth risk, maybe it's called the fifth risk. And what he wrote about was, man, you know, Trump is coming in totally ill prepared to take on the executive branch. He also doesn't have the right management skills. He's going to blow up the executive branch. And so if there's ever a crisis, he's going to immobilize that part of the government. They're not going to be able to effectively handle a crisis. Yeah, so I don't, we got the rest and just looking at it. Yeah, I read the book two and a half years ago. And so that book is very telling of what's going on right now. I mean, we probably could have avoided a lot of the economic damage and a lot of the deaths if they had acted more quickly, but you know, they're afraid of him. He lights up these people with these tweet storms. I mean, he did it to me. I mean, you've never felt more alive than when the president of the United States is calling you a unstable nut job on Twitter. I mean, you know, I mean, so totally fine. I thought it was fucking funny. I went, of course, I went after him because I'm a New Yorker. And I'm not going to let a guy do that to me, you know, of course, then you wouldn't be in New York. Of course. And then he went after my wife, which shows you what a whole life the guy is, right? That's not good. So that's, you know, you're going to have to my wife and your presidential Twitter feed. Okay. What do you think I'm going to do? Do I look like Ted Cruz to anybody? I mean, crazy. So I'll keep punching the league. It's not through the ropes, but he's doing a good job on himself. I mean, he's a very self-destructive guy and I think he's heavily damaged himself, even though he has reasonably good approval ratings related to the crisis and the aftermath of this thing. I think people are really going to come to understand how much damage he did to the economy and how difficult he has been as a leader. And I think there will be in this next election cycle, a return to some level of normalcy, whatever you think of Joe Biden, plus his or minuses of him, he'll probably surround himself with some normal operating people, not this sort of kleptocracy and this sort of nepotism. So yeah, that's my question. Like, why can't I totally understand, but why couldn't he just like lead by advisory committee? Why was that? Because everybody knows that Trump is not an expert in everything that, you know, he's trying to manage and lead and died, so why not just the cure? No, he's wildly insecure and somebody told me that a long time ago, you know, like one of my buddies, his friends with them, he invited his mother, the Mar-a-Lago, Trump pulled up with two Ferraris and this like 80-year-old Italian grandmother was like, Donald, why are you so insecure? I laughed. I thought that was like funny and I told my buddy, I said, how could he be insecure? He's got tons of money, unbelievable real estate and it's a very high profile, how is it got like that insecure? But then when you meet him, like, okay, wow, this guy is maniacally insecure. That's why he's trying to compensate for it with all the blustering and like, I'm smarter than my generals, I'm a very stable genius. I know more than anybody here, you know, I know a lot about this pandemic. My uncle was a genius and so therefore I'm a genius. I mean, you know, I mean, Stormy Daniels basically, I was on the Bill Mars show, she basically told me it was like the size of a shiitake mushroom, I almost threw up on my mouth when she told me that, I was like, disgusting and then, you know, I haven't been to a Chinese, I haven't been to a Japanese restaurant in two years since Stormy told me that. But then right then and there, you're like, okay, I get where this guy's coming from, he is maniacally insecure, it could be, it's just related to his dad, his physicality. And so this is why he acts the way he does and that's why you can't work with Trump and expect him to treat you well and you can't expect him to take your advice. And if your listeners want to hear read an amazing book, it's very accurate, it was a book written called The Very Stable Genius and Phil Rucker wrote it, it was a woman that wrote it alongside of him, I just know Phil better than her, but it was very accurate book and he just talked about how he couldn't take any advice from any expert. He felt insecure in their presence and if they told them something, he would almost do the opposite of it, the prove or try to prove that he knew better than they did. And that is, that's how it goes, that's how it rolls with Trump. I said, that's a dangerous personality when you're charged with the country. Yeah, but you're the thing, remember this, he's dangerous, but he's got willing acolytes. I went to go work for him because I'm a naive son of a construction worker and I've lived a very large part of the American dream and I'm fighting with my wife and my wife and I file for divorce while I was working for him. We subsequently reckons out, but it was like I wouldn't do it because I thought, oh my god, it's the American dream. I'm going to chance to help people, public policy, all this stupid idealism and I got caught in that crossfire and you know, listen, it was humiliating, it was humbling, I got a very big come upence, but the flip side of it was it gave me a platform, you know, it made me a little bit more well-known, it increased my public profile. It's made me somewhat polarizing because my 27-year-old son, who's at Stanford Business School, he's like, hey, pop, you're killing me because the Republicans hate you because you are blasting Trump and the damage crads are never going to accept you because you were with Trump and now you've put me in political nowhere's land and I'm like, well, AJ, my son's name, I'm like, AJ, maybe I'm getting closer to the truth. Point being, I don't actually care. I mean, you get old enough in your life, you know, this is a very important lesson and it's a very hard lesson to learn and it even at my age, it is hard to practice, but when you can get over the hump of not caring what other people think of you and what other people think of you is none of your business. When you can get to that point in your life, it is an amazing level of freedom. You know, I put stuff up on Twitter, but I don't even look at the reply, I think I lost. I shut the notices off on my phone. My attitude is, some of it's robotic and nasty and some of it is keyboard warriors that are bullies and who cares? You know, it's just when the president's coming after me, then I got to go back at him, I got to smack him up a little bit because why wouldn't you do that? I don't think a lot of people have to deal with that problem, but yeah, but I know what a baby, I know what a big baby is, you know, at the end of the day, he's like a big-time coward, you know, just take a look at one of those clips when like you thought somebody was rushing the stage, how he was like running off the stage, you know, I saw that clip. I mean, this guy's never been in a bar, I mean, Anderson Cooper, when I was like, wow, this is like, you're having a bar fight with the president, I'm like, I'm having a bar fight, this guy's never been in a fight in his life, Anderson, you know, he's never been in a bar fight. But anyway, it's not a bar fight, I've dragged the guy out into this tree, you know, it means it's not a bar fight. But the point is that like, you know, this is the nonsense that we're living with now because myself included an I'm responsible for this as is everybody that voted for him, and I went to go work for him. You know, we bought into something that really wasn't there, but at least I've been able to tell the truth, and the least I've been able to say, hey, this is the socks, you know, and, and, you know, think of it this way, if you were hiring this guy as a CEO for your company, and you were on the publicly traded board of that company, you'd be like, we got to get rid of this guy, guys batch it, you know, he's crazy, we got to get rid of him. I think he obviously that though, you see those swings back and forth, you see, you see, you see, right, like right wing, left wing leaders, and they go too far, they go too deep into into what they want to represent, and then you see the opposite end and the next vote or the next, you know, I mean, like that's, you see that a lot. I think, you know, I mean, the smartest voting decisions either both ways. He's going to throw $10 trillion at this current pandemic problem. That may help him come election time, but you look at the data data is overwhelmingly against them. I mean, his numbers are incredibly soft. Many of the Republicans are rejecting what he's doing now. And a couple of Tuesdays ago, super Tuesday three, you had 500,000 additional Democratic voters in the state of Michigan, four Joe Biden, and you know, if you're on the president's campaign, you have to be alarmed by that. You can't be looking at that thing. Oh, that's, that's a good sign very far from it. You know, yeah, well, so we'll see what happens. It's a long way away. Joe's lost a step. Trump acts crazy. You know, I don't know. It's just the best that America has to offer. I don't know, but we're here now, and we'll see what happens. But, you know, for me, it was a learning lesson of a lifetime. And if I could share anything with your listeners on your podcast, don't put your ego in your decision making. You know, take your ego and your pride out of it. And when the handwriting was on the wall, that those guys didn't want me to work in the White House, I should have listened to my wife and stayed away from it. And, you know, and that's ultimately the facts. Now, it happened and it went in a certain direction, and I have absolutely no regrets. It was a learning lesson of a lifetime. But I can tell you when I'm making the decisions, whether it's in my investment decisions, my personal decisions, my professional decisions, when I'm taking my pride out of it, my ego out of it. I'm doing a lot better. Good. No, that's a good advice. What are you? So what are you into, obviously, Skybridge, but you wrote the book, Trump, Blue Collar President. Obviously, you're still involved in investments and whatnot through your firm. So what else is next for you or what are you working on now, Posta? Well, I'm working on my firm. I wrote the book. The book sold very well. Thank God. And it was a very fair book. It had positives of negatives of the president, positive and negative of me. He didn't like the book because, you know, he needs those sorts of books to be 125% in favor of him. But I mean, that's fine. But I mean, it was a very objective book about what happened, the pluses and minuses of what happened. And, you know, I went after myself in that book as much as I went after other things that I saw. So, you know, if you have a moment, it's a fast read. But I'm happy to send you a copy if you have an interest. But the, you know, for me right now, I've got my asset management company. I'm going to restage my conference business once we can get out of our homes. And, you know, I see tremendous opportunity in this current crisis. I think we're going to be roaring. I think the economy is going to roar after this is over. You can't hit the economy with $10 trillion of stimulus and not expect it to have a huge kick up after this thing. So I'm positioning the firm take advantage of that. And we'll see what happens. You know, I'm good friends with Chris and Andrew Cuomo. I sort of grew up with those guys. I do Chris's show twice a month for CNN. And, you know, we sort of, you know, the information I'm getting was sort of be open, fully open, sort of mid-June here in New York. And I think the summer is going to be a surprising upside summer for people. I think there's a sense of appreciation for what they had prior to going into quarantine. And just like after the two, the 100-year-old, or the 102-year-old 1918 pandemic, people that I think are going to come out of their houses exploding with a lot of consumption. I think that, well, I hope that obviously there's a huge up swing after this is all said and done and you're the finance guy. So you have the insight into that. But I would love to, I'd love to understand what do you think in terms of I guess the way we do business. Do you think there's anything that's going to change coming out of this? And trends that have sort of been permanently changed industries, that kind of thing, just your insight as to what you see. Well, I mean, you know, people are saying commercial real estate is going to change because people are working at home. They don't probably need as much space as they originally thought. And retail is changing. We're more habits are being developed of home delivery and telemedicine may change some of the ways people practice medicine. But I think by and large, we're going to more or less go back to a lot of the things that we did before, you know, I like in particular gaming stocks a lot because unless you think that human nature has changed and we've got 5,500 years of human nature that dictates that it hasn't. And I'll take you back to the 2008 crisis. They were down 90% or down 80% right now. Those casinos are closed. The strip is closed. But I think people are going to be back, you know, and I think that they're going to be I think they're going to be a I think it's going to be a explosion to the upside. And so we own a lot of high yield debt in gaming, whether it's seizures or MGM. And you know, we're taking a contrary in play to where these things are trading at right now. And the one thing that I wanted to, I want to close up because I just want to respect your time. But and I want to also just ask a couple sort of like life lesson insight questions that I really love drawing out of people. Was there anything that, you know, we didn't discuss that you sort of like taken on over your career that you wanted to bring up this important and topical to you because if not, then I wanted to ask them closing. Well, I guess I would just say one thing. I would say that we try to solve these problems, these economic problems by taking the easy way out. And so our last economic crisis, we said, okay, we're just going to flood the marketplace with monetary stimulus. We're not going to have a jobs program and infrastructure plan, a plan to right size our educational system. We're not going to do any of those things. And so what ends up happening is the interest rates go down, the liquidity enters the markets, the markets go up, and the people that own the assets get way richer. The people who don't own the assets, they get frustrated and they get angry. And so they're very weird way. The monetary policies implemented after 2008 created the rise of nationalism and the rise of populism because it really did widen the wealth gap or the divide between rich and poor. And I'm just hoping and praying that we don't do that again here. It seems like there's enough going on in terms of a main street stimulus and a wall street stimulus where we won't do that. But I really hope we don't do that because we have to figure out a way to solve for that and dial down the anger and get more focused on what works. You know, let's focus on left and right wing extremism, let's focus on left and right and more focus on right or wrong as it relates to policy implementation. So anyway, I just wanted to bring that up because I think it's very important that we start having smart people talk about it that way as opposed to the nonsense we see on cable, cable news. You see like, you know, not to go too, because that's a huge topic. Do you see any any momentum like moving towards smarter discussions and less, you know, like dog like like he's like far right far left leaning cable TV. He election debates and whatnot that really are not conducive to anybody's actual life. Yeah, no, not with Trump. You'll never going to get there with Trump. But hopefully you can break the fever of Trump and his demagoguery and then you can probably get back to people are going to probably be exhausted from all that nonsense. Maybe you can get back to something that's more sensical and more, you know, about about good policy, you know, and again, if you want there to be fairness in the society and I'm a capitalist as most people are that live in the West, you know, you know, you got to have some fairness though, you have to create a platform of equal opportunity. And so the government should help trying to create that platform. So if you grow up like I did, my parents weren't educated, but I got very lucky. We lived in a town that had a really good public school system. You know, if I grew up in an area where the public school system wasn't any good, maybe I wouldn't have created that arc of intellectual education and that spark of intellectual curiosity that led me to toughs and horror. And so I often said, I'm a geez, you know, a lot of the stuff that happens to you in life is providential. You don't pick your parents, location of your birth, you don't pick your brain chemistry, but you know, we should really try to figure out if we've got people that can excel even if they're not born in affluent areas or they're not born to, you know, certain types of parents. Can we help them create a platform of opportunity and aspirational opportunity? And I think we got to work on that now. I think that's the big challenge for the next 20 years. I think that's also, I think that's the reincarnation of the American dream. So the original American dream is to succeed, but I think the reincarnation is to give people the opportunity to succeed. Yeah, I like that a lot. I grew that whole orderly. Amen. Well, I appreciate all the time you met with me. Thank you very much. It's a, you know, and let me know when this goes up. I'll put it up on my social media. No, I appreciate it a lot. I want to ask, can I ask you one, one last question that I ask everybody if that's it. That's all right. Well, actually, sorry, it's the two part question. The first one, the first one is one lesson that you would tell your 20 year old self. That's the first part. Second part is where do people find you if they want to get in touch or consume your content? Yeah, yeah, you know, Attsukaramuji on Twitter is the best place to find me and I would say that my 20 year old self and you got to really think about this. And if you're younger than me, you got to really think about this. And if I've left any impact on you listening to this, you got to do what I'm about to say. And that is live with less fear, live with less anxiety. And you should idealize what you want to do in your life and you should go for it. And I wish my 20 year old self, I had that level of certainty that no matter what happened, I was going to figure it out, right? Like an entrepreneur is somebody that jumps off a cliff and builds the airplane as they're descending down the cliff. And you can do it. You can figure it out. But I had fears and anxieties and financial anxieties as a kid and it probably limited my upside unnecessarily. And so that would be my message to people. Go for it and live your life. Who cares? You know, I mean, you're going to be dead anyway, right? So who cares? I mean, Mel Brooks has the best line of our life ever relaxed. None of us are getting out of your life. So just go for it. And I think that when you do your adrenaline is there and you're meeting the arc of your aspiration and even if it doesn't work out perfectly, you'll be so proud of yourself that you gave yourself the gusto and you believed in yourself enough to give it the try. Beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much. We'll go bless you. Okay. Yeah. Please. Thank you all the best. Thanks again for joining me on the success story podcast. Thanks again, Anthony. I really appreciate the chat. If you haven't already, please subscribe, download, share with your friends, families, peers or coworkers. You can catch this podcast. You can stream it. You can download it wherever you can download or stream podcasts. And you can always catch it on YouTube as well. If you haven't left us a rating, that would be wildly appreciated. Any rating is fine as it as long as it contains five stars. As always, have a great week, have a productive week, and we'll speak again soon. Bye now.