How to Bounce Back When Everything Goes Wrong (Anthony Scaramucci)

hello and welcome to doing it anyway the show where we rethink challenges build up our confidence and learn how to do it anyway my guest this week is antony scaramucci he's not somebody who is shy about failure and facing adversity he is famous for as he puts it owning his shit and he is very big on reflection and sometimes seems to make it all look very easy so i wanted to have this conversation to talk about the things that have been hard in his life because he's faced significant rejections most famously of course being fired as trump's communication director after just 11 days on the job which he says caused him a lot of hurt both personally and professionally and cost him almost his marriage and caused him to have a deep look into the mirror and a rethink about who he was as a human being as smooth as he makes it look on the surface i know him pretty well and i know that there is a lot more that goes into all of this than meets the eye so today we are going beneath the surface to talk about how to come back from a major upset like being fired very publicly how important it is to ask for advice from people how you can overcome humiliation and realize that this is not everybody else's headline and why giving away your power actually ends up making you more powerful i hope you'll enjoy this conversation i found it super useful and i loved hearing this side of my brilliant co-host anthony scaramucci i hope you enjoy the conversation take a listen this episode is presented by vanguard when it comes to investing many of us feel totally out of our depth and we just don't know where to start and we can't be blamed for that a lot of us simply don't have the time or the confidence to take the first steps and that's where vanguard can help with their managed isa vanguards experts do the hard work for you they'll match you to an investment plan that feels right for you and then they'll handle the rest no second guessing just smart professional management so stop wondering 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visit better help.com/trip us that's better help.com/trip us Anthony Scaramucci this is so nice this is a pleasure I mean I'm getting interviewed here right I know you're actually getting interviewed we're gonna go this is this you know the couch session for you I actually think the first time you and I had a substantive conversation was when you interviewed me on my book on confidence it was a great book and I remember thinking two things one that it was kind of interesting that I didn't ever expect you to be interested in that subject so I was intrigued that you would want to talk about that when I always think of you as talking about politics and business but also that you'd actually read the goddamn book I was impressed I gave the confidence code actually to my daughter I thought it was a very good book about self-awareness as a woman and also you know there's a balance right you're trying to like if you were gonna level a frame on a wall there's a bubble you're trying to get in there where you're confident but you're not arrogant and you don't come across preachy or supercilious or something like that we we wrestled a lot with that actually when we were doing the research on confidence about whether basically it meant you had to be a jerk yeah and that that a lot of people obviously don't want to be and I think particularly a lot of women don't want to be come across as the sort of Gordon Gekko type jerk I mean um how but I don't think you do who's this for how real can we be because we could let's be real I think women have a much harder time than men with this topic because of socialization and you can look at studies caddy uh young girls are doing great until they get to a certain age and then there is told that they have to behave a certain way uh and and young boys are told that they don't have to behave in that same way and there's a if you forgive me there's a little bit of people pleasing that goes into that part of the culture and there's a little bit of uh you know reticence you have to hold yourself back in certain settings and so I think it does impair people's ability to be who they really are what they're capable of you know and it creates creates some anxiety too by the way which I thought you just did a great job of explaining all that in your book we um we came across this great quote when we were doing the book which was if life was one long grade school women would be the undisputed rulers of the world and it's exactly what you hit on that women girls do super well in the meritocracy environment of academia where you put your head down you dot every i you cross every t and you get an a grade right and we do very well in that environment then we get into the world of work and somehow the rules change on us and then we don't play so well and all of the jockeying that takes place and the politics of the work environment and the self-promotion that you have to do some of to get ahead I think we find comes less naturally to us do you believe in masculine and feminine energy I thought you were going to say do I believe in star signs because I thought that's where we were going to go I don't think I'm 100 convinced you of that that's a whole other podcast a whole other topic we can make that an ant agonist maybe someday but but do you believe in masculine and feminine energy yeah I think I increasingly do okay and I and I used to think when I was young that it was all you know bs not really bs but I didn't want to believe that there was a difference I think that was the thing I didn't want to think there was any difference yes you see I I didn't know what to believe but I think as I've gotten older and life has been humbling in so many different ways I've been able to believe that there is a difference between masculine and feminine energy and I think there's a difference between masculine and feminine energy and I think there's a difference between masculine and feminine energy and it's not against the women's liberation movement to suggest that I think you just have to accept that biologically hormonally we're set up a little bit differently we're obviously should be treated equally and respected and so forth but I think it's very important in the workplace to have men and women in the workplace because I think the perspectives particularly if the people have a mutuality of respect you're going to have to have a mutuality of respect and you're going to you're getting a perspective uh that I think is necessary for both both sides of the equation okay let's dive into your career and by the way I this is probably very self-serving but I think it makes our podcast work well because there's there's two types of energies going on at the same time I think it's not just energy I think it's also experiences and lived experiences that everybody brings and you bring from your own experience okay I want to dive into your career um you graduated from Harvard Law School mm-hmm failed the bar exam twice got hired by Goldman Sachs it's the only thing I have in common with John F. Kennedy Jr. but go ahead keep going uh after you're at Goldman Sachs after 18 months of the job on February the 1st 1991 you were fired from Goldman Sachs you could look it up it's a Friday night yep you've said that that experience is seared into your memory now what I want to do Anthony in this is you are very good today at making things sound easy um the trials that you've been through in retrospect you've You've found a way to accommodate them, and you almost seem to brush them off. But I want to go back to what it was like at that time, because I think that's what's most useful for the audience. So that's, you know, that's probably a hindsight thing. It's certainly not what was happening at the moment was extreme anxiety for me. You have to remember, I was shooting so wildly in the dark. And I think this is important for young people to recognize. You may see somebody at 60 confident, but at 20, they probably didn't know what the hell they were doing. And I've told people these stories. I'll share a couple of them. I had no idea what a lawyer did. I thought a Wall Street lawyer worked on Wall Street. I actually went down to Wall Street, Caddy, to get my first job as a paralegal, because I thought that's where the Wall Street lawyers were. I didn't realize they were all over the city, and that was just a characterization of them. I wore polyester because I went to. You discount menswear places. I didn't know any better. My parents had no money. So when I had to go for a job interview, I was wearing polyester. I mean, I've gone from polyester to Brioni over the course of my career, but I started in poly. And I'm just going to tell you, I didn't even know better. Okay. And so the guy that hired me, when he fired me at Goldman Sachs, he told me I was an experiment. And I said, what do you mean I was an experiment? He said, I was an experiment. And I said, well, you didn't fit in. You don't fit in. The only thing about you that fits in here is that you went to Harvard. Everything else about you doesn't fit in. You don't dress the part. You don't act the part. You don't talk the part. And you certainly don't have relationship transferability, meaning a lot of the people that got hired into the firm had fathers that worked on Wall Street. Their fathers were doctors. Fathers, you know, I had never seen the inside of a country club, Caddy, when I started at Goldman. When you talk about that now, you wear it almost as a badge of honor, that you didn't fit in and you didn't let that stop you. What did it feel like in the moment not to fit in? Well, it's interesting because I don't see it as a badge of honor as much as I see it as an objective observation of what happened. And I think I like talking about it because there are people out there that are in the middle class or you guys would say in England, working class. I want them to know that it's doable. I want them to know that they can find their way. They'll be in that right of power. In their passage, there'll be wild amounts of self-consciousness and wild amounts of stupidity and failure, but they can find their way. And so, yeah, I talk about it not necessarily as a badge of honor, but almost as like, hey, man, this is how it went down. You know, Caddy, let me step back for a second. I could tell a very different story. I could say, hey, you know what? I had a really high IQ. I went to Tufts, Harvard, graded well in both places. Went to Goldman. You know, the personnel director told me when I got fired, I never had to mention I got fired. They were so generous to me. They told me they were going to mark me down as interdepartmental transfer. So I got fired on February 1st. I got rehired on March 28th, you know, 60 days later. And Tony Infante, who's now retired, was a lovely person. She ran personnel. She said, Anthony, we're just going to mark you down as an interdepartmental transfer. So I could. I could have hidden. So I could have told you the following story. Ready? Blue collar, Tufts, Harvard, seven years at Goldman, Oscar Capital Management, Entrepreneur of the Year in the financial services category, 2011, Ernst & Young. And I could have given you all of these laurels. And then what happens is you become another caricature on Wall Street. And I have read more than one. I'm a billionaire memoir. And they're very self-congratulatory. And look at me, Katty. They're up and to the right. And everything went well. They kept climbing the ladder and it worked out. Yeah, and they're great. And everything they did was perfect. And by the way, that really sucks for their children. Because you have beautiful children, many of which I've met. I have five children. If you don't expose your vulnerabilities and your humanness to your children, and you've had the level of career success that I've had. And again, I don't have the career success of some of the mega billionaires on Wall Street, but I've had meaningful career success as an entrepreneur. It would cast a shadow over my children, right? So it's almost worth being vulnerable and being expressive of the humanity of the whole thing gives the children more space, Katty. I think it's easy for you and I to be vulnerable. And I talk a lot about the mistakes I've made and what it was like going through it. Because I do think that's the most helpful thing. That we can give the people that are coming up behind us. But what did it feel like in the time? Because it can be so defining to have that kind of a career knock. How did it feel in the time? And how did you in that moment kind of get up the next morning and not hide out? I always say this to people. You got to use your sense of humor. You got to find the comedy in life. You know what I mean? It was brutal, Katty. But let me tell you. Because we're talking about confidence, okay? Real confident people tell you the truth. Real confident people, when they get shit canned or they get their ass kicked, they're like, yeah, I got my ass kicked. They don't code it over. They don't go like this, like the scarecrow in the Wooden Vase and blame other people. They're accountable for their actions. And real confident people, Katty, they don't play the victim. They don't sit there and say, oh, woe is me. Life is coming at me in the wrong way. When I got fired, the Gulf War had started. And that's the reason I got fired. We were going to a reception. They cut a third of the people. And I sucked at the job, by the way. And so I was part of the lower third. And they fired me. And I said to the guy that fired me, I wish I had some Patriot missile systems to protect me from these scuds that were coming into my little cubicle. And the guy laughed. I mean, the point is, I didn't – and the other thing is, I don't want to be that guy where I have the woe is me tag on me, right? So all I said to the guy was, I know you're going through a bad day, too, firing me. Could you do me a favor, please, and be a reference for me? Because I'm actually a good person. I'm a hard worker. I just wasn't good at this job. There's going to be another job that I'm good at. Could you at least give me a reference on my character and my personality? But it was brutal, Catty. And I had no money. And so I took a loan. The day I got fired, I was so nervous, okay? I was 27 years old. I had no money. And I took a loan out from a Goldman Sachs investment banker. I paid him off. But I went to a guy that was in the division, and I said, you know, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to pay my school debt and my rent and stuff like that until I get on my feet. Would you lend me $5,000? And he was so generous. He said, you know, I have a Dreyfus money market account. I'm getting 3%. I'm not going to charge you a loan rate. I'll charge – whatever's in my Dreyfus, I'm going to charge you a loan rate. I'm going to give you 5 grand. Pay me back that plus the 3% interest. And it took me a year, and I paid him back. But if you really want to know, I was panicked. And I was up at night, and I went to the bank. I got fired on a Friday. I went to the bank on a Saturday, and I got four rolls of quarters, $40 worth of quarters. You say, well, why would I do that? Well, I was going back into Grand Central Station, and there were no – I didn't have a cell phone. I couldn't afford a cell phone in 1991. I was using those quarters at pay phones. In the train station, I was putting quarters in and calling. Hello, Caddy. Hey, how are you? I lost my job at Goldman. I'm looking for a job. Do you know anybody that is in this place or that place, or there's a job available here or a job available there? And then finally, someone called me and said, hey, there's a job at Goldman on the 29th floor, and it's a sales position in the investment. Research area. You would probably be really good at that. And then I called my old boss. I said, remember I said I need help? And he said, oh, you'd actually be good at that job. And then I took a 40% pay cut, Caddy, to take that job. But it allowed me to stay at Goldman, and it got me in an area that made me – that I was really good at that job, actually. Did being at Goldman as a status symbol matter to you? No. This is, again, so crazy. I mean, I went to law school because in 1985, I read an article that they were paying lawyers $65,000 a year, first-year lawyers. My dad – my pops was making $32,000 a year. So I was like, okay, that's more money than I could ever need. I'm going to go to law school. I'd like to tell you it was super analytical and strategic. It wasn't. When I took the job at Goldman, the lawyers were getting – at that time, the prices were going up. The lawyers were getting $82,000 a year. Up from the $65,000, but the Goldman Sachs starting salary for an associate investment banker was $110,000. So it was just about the money. It was. And you know what? If that makes me shallow to people, and if that makes me superficial, so be it. I didn't have any money, Caddy. And I was like, okay, how am I going to pay off these loans? And plus, my parents, even at that time in my life, were relying on some level of supplemental income from me. And I'm going to go to law school. I'm going for the money. So if Lehman Brothers. had paid more than Goldman, I probably would have gone to Lehman. You know, I, I wasn't, I mean, I don't know. I want, Gaddy, you don't run your own business on Wall Street if you're status conscious. Okay. Because when you go to the cocktail party, you're running your own business. When you, I remember, uh, one of my buddies, when I, when I left Goldman, he was like, well, how the hell are you going to go to these, what are you going to tell these people, these cocktail parties? You're, you're, you're working at what? See, that's a status oriented person. I wasn't like that. I didn't give a shit. So then you start Skybridge, your own firm, and- No, I started something called Oscar Capital Management. And then Skybridge. So, so I left, I left in 90 sticks. I had a partner. His name was Andrew Bozart. He was a terrific guy. If you took the B off of the first syllable of his name, Bozart, and the SCAR of my name, it was the worst name in financial services history. We called it Oscar Capital Management. It was so stupid. But anyway, we did very well. We were, we had very good chemistry and we built a very nice business. And right after 9-11, we sold the business to Neuberger Berman for a lot of money. It was a nine figure sale and it was a differentiator in my life. It changed my entire life. And then I went to work at Neuberger. Neuberger got bought by Lehman. And then in 2005, I left Lehman to start Skybridge. And in 2008, the financial crash. Hits and Skybridge almost went under. And you've spoken about what that moment of crisis was like, because you didn't then have to be just your own job that you were worried about. You were managing clients and you were trying to keep your business afloat. How afraid were you? And what did that fear feel like? A lot, a lot of sleepless nights. I was convinced we were going out of business. Uh, I actually had. Two guys came to me and said to me, it was, we were in this building, but we were upstairs. I had a little tiny conference room and they were ex Goldman partners. And they both looked at me and said, you should declare bankruptcy or fold up the business or close it down. And I said, why is that? Well, your assets just went from 400 million to 200 million because of the crisis and the redemptions. And you don't even have enough money to pay the staff. And I looked at them. I said, yeah, well, we're not. Doing that. And so I took no pay for that year. Me personally, um, I had to trim up the staff, unfortunately, and then I had to figure out what to do. And so one of the first things I did was all the big banks were leaving the conference business. And so I said, okay, they're all leaving the conference business. Let's start a conference business because if I'm right, the conference business is going to return. If I'm wrong, it'll be like the farewell party on the Titanic. It'll be our last, last party. How did you keep your ego out of that failure? How did you, cause I always have this, um, I've had plenty of failures in my career, uh, and some of them would be quite public. And one of the things I learned is that you're not everybody else's headline. And there is a temptation to think when something goes wrong, that it's all about you and everybody's talking about you. And actually most people are way too busy with their own lives and their own problems to be thinking about your problem. But how did you manage that? How did you keep. How did you stop this being about you? You are a dear friend and very generous to me, but I didn't manage it well. I wrote about it in my first book, goodbye, Gordon gecko. I called it Davos envy. Okay. I was at the world economic forum at the invitation of Michael Dell and I was sitting in a room. I was 43 at the time. I think Mark Zuckerberg was 23. So we were separated by 20 years and $20 billion. And I remember talking about ego. I felt this. Small standing next to him. And I remember going back to that dodgy three star hotel room, which you've experienced in Davos and I've experienced. And I remember sitting there in the hotel room and saying to myself, oh, wow, I, you know, I'm not making it. I'm, I'm failing, I'm failing here. And I remember getting a piece of paper out and I was writing down what was going wrong in the business. And then I said, okay, let me flip the page and let me write down what could go right in the business. And I was like, okay, let me flip the page and let me write down what could go right in the business. And I remember getting a piece of paper out and I was like, okay, let me flip the page and let me write down what could go right in the business. And you've heard me joke around saying I'm too short to see the glass anything other than half full. When I look at the glass, it looks full. And so I made a decision. Did you teach yourself that? Did you teach yourself to be a pro-noiac? And how did you do it? I did because I come from a family of the glass is half empty. I come from blue collar. Let me tell you something. You grew up in a blue collar neighborhood like me. Look, these are the people that I grew up with. I'm not voting for Trump. The world's against me. The system is rigged against me. Of course, I'm buying into the conspiracy theory because that'll explain why I'm not doing well. And the glass is half empty. And I read a book in 1990 or 1991 by Martin Seligman called Learned Optimism. Yeah, famous book. Okay. And I said, oh my God, this guy's so right. And I've got to build the habits right now. I know you've talking to Adam Grant or guys like James Clear. I got to build the habits right now. I got to break out of the family. How did you do it? One day, one minute, one thought at a time. That's the only way you can do it. You can't just say, oh, I'm going to go do it. It's like, I'm going to lose 20 pounds. Okay, well, you got to eat this amount today and that amount tomorrow. And you got to do it one day at a time. And when I got fired, I said, hmm, learned optimism. I'm going to make the best of this situation. So that was my first big test. Then I got rehired and then I did well. Now the crisis has come. And let me, again, be very candid with people. I had some dough, Caddy, because I sold the first business and I had some dough. I'm putting that dough into the business. Okay, so this is the stupidest or perhaps the smartest thing I ever did. When the crisis came, a lot of these banks had to shed assets. And so I bought from Citibank. A alternative investment fund. And I put up all my money. So I had money in the bank. I liquidated it. I liquidated my stock account. And I used the money to buy the Citibank business. Now that was a very high risk thing to do because who knows, you know, we closed in July of 2010. Who knows if the market would have fully recovered. But that's what you sometimes have to do as an entrepreneur. But that's a pro-NOIAC. That's a pro-NOIAC decision. I like that. I'm going to make the bet that the universe is going to work this out with me. And by the way, if you change your mindset to that, you do better. You know, Henry Ford was probably a bad dude. Okay, we could talk about his history. But I have a quote from Henry Ford. If you went to my ski house up in Wyndham and you walked into the library, there's a quote. And what does it say? It says, if you think you can. Or you think you can't, you're right. If you think you can or you think you can't, you are right. Okay. And I tell my kids that all day. You got to believe that you're going to do it even in the depths of something going badly. So you've said two things that we found. And I don't know if you knew this from research. But when we were doing all of our research on confidence, a couple of things. One thing is that writing it down, actually, neurologists believe this. It imprints it on your brain more than anything else. No question. So you write a list of the things that are going well. You write a list of the things, successes that you've had. It's extraordinary what it does. But it's also that you're changing your neuropathways and you can choose to do that. I always envisage it like water is coming down a stream down the hill. And you want to change the direction of the stream. And you can do it. You can do things. There are tricks that neurologists told us about. You remind yourself when things are going badly. You remind yourself of the. Three things that went well for everything that you're thinking that's negative. You've got to have three positive things. And you, it's a, it's a boring, it's like doing X. It's like working out. It's like you and I train with Ray. This is like doing a mental exercise and it works. When I read your two books, I gave them to my daughter. And I talk a lot about the elements. A lot of the stuff I'm saying to you is actually come out of your books, but it's in, you know, it's in that neuroscience of believing and thinking for yourself. But I think, I think there's a bigger message and that is from Jackie Robinson. And so for viewers outside the U S who is Jackie Robinson, Jackie Robinson is the first African-American athlete to play professional sports. We had a racist society. They wouldn't let the blacks in a football, baseball, et cetera. He crossed the color line, April 15th, 1947. And so you can't see it right now, but I have a picture of Muhammad Ali in my office and Jackie Robinson in my office. He is over here. Those are my two heroes. why? Because they took on so much risk to do that. But Jackie said something that people should really listen to. You are at your best when you're helping and serving others. You are at your best. You will feel the best. You will feel a karmic positivity from that. And you can become a leader. If people believe in you, that you're there to help them, then they'll let you lead them. They will let you lead them. And Jackie understood this better than anybody. And I'm going to tell you something because you'll appreciate this, and we know each other now pretty well. Somebody reached out to me, very high profile person. It would be inappropriate to bring up the person's name on your show. But somebody reached out to me, doesn't know me from a hole in the wall, saw me on Instagram discussing some of my trials and tribulations. And they were going through something. And they knew. We had a mutual friend. And so they say, you think he would be inclined to take a call from me? I'd like to get some advice from him. And of course, my friend said, yeah, of course he would. And when I got off the phone after talking to that person about their situation, I felt really good, Katty. Of course. Okay. I felt really good. I'm like, oh my God, okay. You know, I was able to relate in an empathic way to that person, right? You know the words, Sonder, right? Sonder is S-O-N-D-E-R. It is a German word. And it means that you have a life and all your trials and tribulations and the concentric circles around your life. Well, guess what? I got that too. And oh, by the way, there are faceless, nameless people walking around here in Manhattan, but they all have their own Sonder. And if you're in touch with that level of humanity, you can become very empathic. And I'm telling you, was I like that at age 40? No. Was I like that at age 20? No. After I got the living daylights beaten out of me at the White House, did I become more like that? I absolutely did. Okay. So let's talk about that other big event in your life, professional event. And by the way, I always, let's flip this because I always say to young people, don't be afraid of asking for help because actually people get so much pleasure from giving. Help that it frees you up then to ask for help. You're doing actually the person you're asking from, you're doing them a favor by allowing them to help you. No, no question. Okay. We're going to talk about your other big failure that was so public, the one you're well-known for, and that is being fired by the White House and that experience. We'll take a quick break and come back and talk about that. Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goal Hangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money, between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate and easy transfer and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. 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Okay, let's talk about the White House. You've spoken a lot about that. And you've spoken a lot about the importance of not sharing what people think about you. You have the great phrase from your grandmother about it's none of your business what other people think of you. And yet I know that that was a humiliating experience. So how did you weigh those two things, the humiliation of being fired, and it was so public, along with that side of you that didn't want to care about what people thought of you? Well, it was humiliation on a number of different levels. Okay. One of the things was, let's just face it, I failed at that job. I'm not blaming anybody other than me. I was probably not qualified for that job. And I guess my ego attracted me to the job. And then if I really did have appropriate self-awareness, I wouldn't have worked for President Trump in a situation like that. And I was just seeking the job to fulfill my own ego and my own pride. So there's that part of it that you have to deal with. That in itself, by the way, is self-humiliation. And I think that's a really important part of it. And I think that's a really humiliation, right? Because now you got to look in the mirror and say, wow, you're really no better than anybody else. You're as weak as all of the. We sometimes sneer at the other people, Caddy, right? We read about their shortcomings or their moral failures and say, well, it's not us. But when it turns out that it actually is you, that is the humiliation, right? So it's not what other people think of you. It's what you think of you, Caddy. Does that make sense? And so I'm looking at me. Thinking of me saying, wow, you suck. You know, you did not handle this well. You were not empathetic to your wife and the situation around your family. You were too egomaniacal to take the job. You're too prideful. And so the humiliation was there. So when you talk about external humiliation, like comedians ripping you up or the press ripping you up or people trying to malign your character or your moral purpose on earth, you know, all of that stuff is humiliating. Don't get me wrong. But the facing the music inside your own personality, staring into the mirror and having to accept your frailty and shortcomings, that's where the real humiliation lives, right? How did you do that? How did you look in the mirror and realize that this was about your choices and something you had done wrong and not being the person you wanted to be? Such a great question. And in the beginning, I did not do that. In the beginning, I said, okay, wow, that was a real big bummer. I got fired. I really do love Deirdre. Deirdre and I are in the middle of about to get divorced. So how are we going to fix this? And then Tony Robbins, I don't know if I've ever told you this story, but Tony wrote the foreword for my book upon entrepreneurship. And Tony said to me, look, I've met you and your wife. You should come to my house. You should come to Date with Destiny. I'm going to hire you a life coach who has been with me forever. He's a great relationship. And I'm going to hire you a life coach who is a great relationship. And I'm going to hire you a wife who is a relationship expert. His wife is also a relationship expert. If your wife really wants to divorce you, it's over. And so a result of which you're going to have to be a man and make sure the divorce is done as amicably as possible. But if she doesn't want to divorce you, you're also going to have to be a man and you have to pull the thing back together. And so the life coach that I hired beat the daylights out of me. It was like going- How? What did he say? It was like going to a psychological boot camp. He said the hard truths. He told me things about myself that we have a tendency to code over. Robert Greene wrote a great book about human nature and power. And one of the books is called The 48 Laws of Power. Robert's a friend of mine. He's been on my podcast. And the reason why people like the book is they're reading about the positivity and the sinister nature of human beings. And there was the life coach explaining to me my sinister nature. And that was tough, Caddy, because now I have to face the music and I have to own the weaker parts of my character, the weaker parts of my personality. But like he said to me, which I firmly believe, if you don't do that, then you have no hope of fixing that. And so I said, okay, you're right about that. I want to fix that. How do I go about fixing that? And that requires- It requires self-awareness. It requires dropping your ego, like you said, getting yourself off the- you're not the story. You're just another sonder out there like everybody else. And it requires you to have some stoicism. You have to accept that you're changing. You have to accept that whatever's in the past is over. Now you've got a day to start forward again. And it took a while for me and Deirdre to repair our relationship and thankfully that went well. But then as I did that, As I built those habits, then it became more comfortable to talk about it. I would be lying to you if I said to you, oh, you know, I got fired on July 31st. On August 1st, I'm talking about it as comfortably as I'm talking about it right now. I was effing shell-shocked. Is there anything? I mean, you really are somebody, Anthony, who strikes me as somebody who is profoundly self-aware and confident. Is there anything that still stings? Is there anything you still feel you need to work on that still takes that repetition and mental process? There's always things that you have to work on. You have to manage your primordial aspects of your brain. To suggest at times you don't feel envy, you're lying to yourself. Suggest at times you don't feel some pangs of jealousy, well, guess what? You're lying to yourself. You're in this primordial vessel. Okay? If you read Jeff Hawkins' book on intelligence, this thing was created over millennials, thousands and thousands of years. And then there's a piece of it, and it's the top of it. You've heard me talk about it. It's six playing cards in height and width. That's the dimension of it. It's right here. It's called the neocortex, right? It's the new cortex. It's probably 500,000 years old. And in that little piece of cellular activity is your consciousness. Your self-awareness, what they would call your sentience. And so every other part of your brain, though, you know, you're hitting people in the head in a rock, you're, "Oh, that guy's got a nicer cave than mine. Let me go over there and hit him in the head of a rock and take his cave." You know what I mean? Why he left, because that's what we do. It's so true. That's where the amygdala comes in. That's where the amygdala comes in, right? So you've got the front part of the brain and the amygdala. And the Buddhist would tell you, "You're an animal, but you're not an animal. You're an animal with a spirit." And the Buddhist would tell you that you have to get to that transcendental moment where you're breaking free from the primordial aspects of who you are into something that is more sublime, right? I actually think it's also—you've said something that I think is very helpful to people listening, which is that you give yourself a bit of grace and actually realizing that you still have vulnerabilities, you still have jealousies, you still compare yourself to other people, and recognizing that you are not alone. And recognizing that you are—we did a whole episode for this series on self-compassion and the ability to treat yourself as you would treat your best friend. And that's what you're pointing to as well, which I think is super helpful. So, listen, you know I'm a Catholic, and you know I still practice my religion. And what are we teaching that religion? Forgiveness. But you know what we don't really talk about? Self-forgiveness, okay? And that is the number one thing of—like, anybody gets anything out of this conversation, Cady? How about forgiving yourself? Yeah. Instead of—how about admitting that you did something wrong, number one, and then number two, okay, I did something wrong, doesn't reflect well on me, but I'm going to forgive myself. And I often tell people, there's a millstone. You have a choice. You can hang it on your neck, and you can walk around with it, and it can cow you. Or you can take the millstone of regret and the millstone of woe off your neck. I don't wake up in the morning and say, oh, man, let me kick myself in the pants today. I got fired from the White House. Let me kick myself. Let me kick myself really hard in the pants today. I don't do it. I've forgiven myself for that part of my life. I've forgiven myself for indiscretions in my personal romantic relationships, you know. Bill O'Reilly asked me something the other day. We're on his podcast. And he almost fell off the chair because he said, okay, what is one thing that you totally regret in your life? And I looked at him. You know what I said? I said, in my first marriage, I grew up in a very combustible, blue-collar family. My dad was a very aggressive guy. He batted us around the house. I became a conflict avoider to the point where I didn't tell my first wife where the problems were in the marriage. And they stewed and they manifested themselves. I owed her that. And I didn't have the gumption to do it because of my upbringing. And so, Bill, you know what my regret is? I wish I had the skill set that I have today. I'm still a conflict avoider, as you well know. But I'm not as horrifically a conflict avoider. And I did my marriage and I did my first wife a disservice by not fully explaining what I thought the problems were. They built up like a big balloon. And then when the balloon burst, the marriage was over. You can't be more honest than that, Caddy. I mean, there's no way to give, you know. I agree. And I think that's actually, I want to just, as we close, we've got a few minutes left. And I want to give some advice, you to give some advice to people. Because one of the things I think you have found in your career and through your own experience, because you have become very emotional, I would say you're a very high EQ person. You seem to me to value in your employees, particularly in your young employees, emotional intelligence, as much as you value their IQ or their technical skills. Why is that so important in an employee? Because I have a small team. And like you think about the Knicks, okay, you know, a soccer team's got 11 people or a football team has 11 people. The Knicks are five people. So they got to be selfless and they've got to subordinate themselves to each other. And they got to play on a team. And so if you have really good EQ, you know that you are not better than the coalition. And so. So to me, good EQ is I can pass the ball. Good EQ is that the rest of politics U.S. doesn't work without Caddy K. It just doesn't. Okay. And so good EQ is pass the ball. And I want the kids out here, the men and women out here to pass the ball to each other. You know, somebody, you know, Tony Pastor, who you and I know really well, I had lunch with him. He's like, how are you writing books, running conferences, doing podcasts, managing? And I said, because I'm doing none of those things. Because I have a staff that I am in a servant leader position in where I have a John Darcy running the conference, a Brett Messing running the portfolio, a Marie Noble running compliance. And so I'm serving them. I'm like, okay, where do you need me to be? What do you need me to do? As opposed to me being a bottleneck to those people. You see what I mean? Now that is confidence, by the way. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here. But you have to. You have to have enough self-confidence where you don't have to have the insecurity to believe that you're the guy. You don't have to do everything. You have to be, hey, I am confident enough where I want Caddy to get the credit for this. I want Marie to get the credit for this. I'm confident enough. You know the way you become super powerful, Caddy? Give the power away. The more power you give. The more power you give away, the more powerful you become. Because now the people around you are like, hey, this dude's trying to help me. You know, it's important for me that John Darcy has a great career here and that he does better here than he would do on his own. And so, therefore, I'm giving him more power and more autonomy. You want to be powerful? Give the power away. Okay. We have one minute left. And the last thing I want to ask you is something we have asked all of our guests, which is, what is one confidence piece of advice, one confidence code piece of advice that you would give to the people listening to this podcast? The main thing is don't take yourself that seriously. Have a sense of humor about yourself. If someone points out a flaw about yourself, go with it. Who cares? You know, Gary Lineker, I said, you know, this guy's 5'1", and Gary Lineker looked at me, you mean the same height as you? And I said, yes, Gary, the same height as me, except I'm on platform shoes, so I don't have to look at your nose hairs, okay? I mean, you know, my point is, you're never going to get harmed if you're willing to take the essence of who you are and everything with it. How are they going to pick on you? You go, oh, yeah, okay, that's true. Okay, let's move to the next thing. Self-confidence and self-deprecation and sense of humor are all in the same family tree. And learn that. And if you learn that, you'll go really far. I think that's the key from this conversation is how much you can learn, and that these are choices you have. You can make these choices. Of course. 100%. Anthony Scaramucci, thank you very much. Yeah, I like being interviewed by Katty Kay. I've got to do this more often. We'll do it again. Thank you all so much for listening. I've had a great time doing this series, and I will be back next week with Mika Brzezinski for a final Q&A, because you have sent in so many brilliant questions. We wanted a chance to answer them. A reminder that this episode, will not appear though on the Rest Is Politics US podcast feed. So if you want to listen to this Q&A, do search for Doing It Anyway with Katty Kay, wherever you get your podcasts, and hit follow so you don't miss it. See you next week. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks, and feels. 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