Speaker 1: This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. Hi,
Speaker 1: this is Barry Ridholts and you're listening to Masters in
Speaker 1: Business on Bloomberg Radio. The podcast portion a little background.
Speaker 1: I know Scaramucci, or as he's widely known, the Mooch,
Speaker 1: for a good couple of years. Um, we've done a
Speaker 1: number of shows together, We've been at various conferences together.
Speaker 1: But the way I kind of first got to know
Speaker 1: who he was, I've called him the man who rescued
Speaker 1: Dell and as well here in the conversation. He's very
Speaker 1: self effacing and he's all about we the team. When
Speaker 1: he was at Goman Sacks, it was the team. And
Speaker 1: when he was at UM other places like new Berger
Speaker 1: and Berman or Lehman Brothers, it was all about the team.
Speaker 1: But I'm gonna share a little bit of info that
Speaker 1: he was too monest to talk about. You know, when
Speaker 1: when Dell ran into some trull in the early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: he was a young kid. He was a hotshot CEO,
Speaker 1: one of the youngest CEOs of an SMP company ever,
Speaker 1: and they ran into a bunch of trouble. You know,
Speaker 1: HP kind of retooled and went after them. Ibm UM
Speaker 1: became a better competitor, and at the same time their
Speaker 1: CFO began dabbling in the currency markets something as it
Speaker 1: turned out that he was wholly unqualified to two and
Speaker 1: del The company lost hundreds of millions, if not billions
Speaker 1: of dollars that they simply didn't have to lose, and
Speaker 1: they really needed a cash infusion. And my understanding, and
Speaker 1: this is second and third hand and based on some
Speaker 1: old research and some old conversations, was nobody was especially
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about getting this deal done. Um Anthony said. If
Speaker 1: he wasn't there, it would have happened. Somebody else would
Speaker 1: have picked up the ball. I'm less convinced of it.
Speaker 1: I think that he was a guy who was sort
Speaker 1: of an odd fit at Harvard Law to Goldman Sachs
Speaker 1: investment banking, not exactly the usual candidate. And I think
Speaker 1: that he was looking around for something that he understood
Speaker 1: and he could pick up and run with that nobody
Speaker 1: else really did. And he had was impressed with Michael
Speaker 1: Dell as a person, and he understood the situation as
Speaker 1: to the trouble the CFO had created by engaging in
Speaker 1: these currency hedges that all went bad, and so he
Speaker 1: decided to pick up the ball, and with a great
Speaker 1: Rolodex and a great network and a very personable way
Speaker 1: about him, essentially rescued Dell as a company, managed to
Speaker 1: get a lead, managed to raise money, managed to get
Speaker 1: the deal done. But what's fascinating about the discussion with
Speaker 1: Scaramucci is that he for a guy who is as
Speaker 1: wildly successful as he is on pretty much every level.
Speaker 1: The company, he's running, the conference, he's running, the resurrection
Speaker 1: of Lewis ruck Kaiser's Wall Street Week. By just about
Speaker 1: any measure, he's a tremendously successful guy. The conversation we
Speaker 1: have is all about failure. He discusses how he was
Speaker 1: fired by it from Goldman Sachs. He discusses how when
Speaker 1: he first launched Skybridge, it was pretty much a disaster.
Speaker 1: It wasn't happening the way they had hoped, and then
Speaker 1: the financial crisis had come along. But the the thing
Speaker 1: that we hear over and over again in all the
Speaker 1: stories that he tells is that each subsequent failure is greeted,
Speaker 1: if that's the right word, as an opportunity, as a
Speaker 1: learning expense, as a learning situation, as as as a
Speaker 1: chance to pivot and try and do something new and different,
Speaker 1: to rise from the ashes, so to speak, and Skybridge
Speaker 1: is a perfect example. He tells the story of how
Speaker 1: originally they started out as a hedge fund seating company
Speaker 1: and that really wasn't going especially well when the financial
Speaker 1: crisis hit, and in the attempt to raise some seed
Speaker 1: capital from City Group, ended up essentially recognizing that they
Speaker 1: had to get rid of their hedge fund practice. It
Speaker 1: was a liability and they were really retooling dramatically, and
Speaker 1: so Mooch as he's known, ended up picking up a
Speaker 1: couple of billion dollars in assets, really very inexpensively, and
Speaker 1: parlayed that into their nearly uh ten billion dollar fund
Speaker 1: of funds now and runs a very straightforward approach. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you're looking for us to beat the market, if
Speaker 1: you want to generate alpha, if you're looking for all
Speaker 1: those sort of things, that's not what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1: That's not what we're capable of doing. He's pretty straightforward
Speaker 1: in not over promising, and therefore he doesn't under deliver.
Speaker 1: So I babbled on long enough. I think you'll find
Speaker 1: this to be a really really interesting conversation. My interview
Speaker 1: with guy Bridge Capitals Anthony Scaramucci. This is Masters in
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today
Speaker 1: is Anthony Scaramucci. You may know him as the Mooch.
Speaker 1: He is the founder of Skybridge Capital and the Impress
Speaker 1: Sario behind the Big Salt Conference, which takes place every
Speaker 1: year in Las Vegas. Anthony, Welcome to Bloomberg Barry. It's
Speaker 1: a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: So you're at Goldman Sachs in the nineties, coming out
Speaker 1: of Harvard Law. You are summarily dismissed from Goldman What
Speaker 1: do you do with your career then? So, now it's
Speaker 1: a Friday afternoon. I go home very rejected, and I
Speaker 1: wake up on Monday dust myself off. I have a
Speaker 1: roll of quarters because we didn't have cell phones back then.
Speaker 1: I took a train back into the city. I started
Speaker 1: pumping quarters into stay phones and I was calling my
Speaker 1: buddies asking for help, and finally I reached the fellow
Speaker 1: was a great friend of mine. He said, hey, listen,
Speaker 1: there's a job offer and an opening at Goldman Sacks.
Speaker 1: I said, are you kidding me? He said, in the
Speaker 1: sales area. I said, okay, that's probably better suited for
Speaker 1: my skill set. So I called my old boss who
Speaker 1: had just fired me. His name is Michael Facetel. He
Speaker 1: built the building that we're in. He was the CEO
Speaker 1: of Vernado Realty, went on to become CEO Vernado Realty Trust.
Speaker 1: I said, Michael, you gotta help me get this job
Speaker 1: in sales at Goldman. Uh and so he put a
Speaker 1: call in for me. I got interviewed. There were many
Speaker 1: interviews later, they offered me a job on March. So
Speaker 1: I was out of Goldman from February one to March.
Speaker 1: But I got rehired two months about two months. So
Speaker 1: so there's an ironic thing. I got to keep the
Speaker 1: eleven thousand dollars seven check, thank god, grand months and
Speaker 1: I got and I got myself a new job at Goldman,
Speaker 1: which is better suited for me. So so the lesson
Speaker 1: for younger viewers out there is, try to go for
Speaker 1: the jobs that you think you're well suited for, not
Speaker 1: the ones that you think are the sexy job. Don't
Speaker 1: breed in security in your own personality. Go for the
Speaker 1: stuff you think so you stay at Goldman for a
Speaker 1: couple more years. But eventually, and I think it's ninety six,
Speaker 1: you end up leaving to launch Oscar Capital. That's correct.
Speaker 1: What was Oscar Capital like? So it was Andrew Bozart,
Speaker 1: So his name was bo s. My first name, I
Speaker 1: make last name is S. C. A. R. We dropped
Speaker 1: the be called it Oscar Capital, worst name in financial
Speaker 1: services history. Every time we had a meeting people for
Speaker 1: our year affiliated with Oscar Meyer the hot dog company.
Speaker 1: You know, Oscar the grouch. But we built a one
Speaker 1: billion dollar registered investment advisor that had a small hedge fund.
Speaker 1: We had a very good relationship with Fidelity. We were
Speaker 1: part of the advisor referral program. I think New Burger
Speaker 1: wanted to be in that business with Fidelity, so that's
Speaker 1: why they They contacted Greg Fleming, who was the M
Speaker 1: and a banker at Mary Lynch. He's now the president
Speaker 1: of Morgan Stanley. Greg was our merger banker and we
Speaker 1: did the d all six weeks after the nine eleven
Speaker 1: terrorist attack, really in two thousand one. So you have
Speaker 1: gone for five years. Now you get bought by New
Speaker 1: Burger and I think it's too and I'm assuming for
Speaker 1: a billion dollars in a U M there's a number
Speaker 1: of ways of calculating that um multiple of sales or
Speaker 1: how how did they figure out I'm perfectly understand if
Speaker 1: you want to blurt out the number, but what was
Speaker 1: the formula that we're playing with? It was at times sales. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a I'm an open guy, but I
Speaker 1: did sign a confidentiality. It was a reasonable multiple. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think of earnings of of revenue, how do they
Speaker 1: they do? Yeah, it was multiple of revenues. But I
Speaker 1: think I think the interesting thing about it is, I mean,
Speaker 1: none of us were crying when we when we did
Speaker 1: the deal, But I think the interesting thing about it
Speaker 1: is you have to make sure if you're ever going
Speaker 1: to do a deal like that on your own company
Speaker 1: and you're gonna sell it, you gotta make sure you
Speaker 1: sell it to people that are similarly situated personality wise.
Speaker 1: Thank god that was the case for us. I sold
Speaker 1: the business to a guy named Bob nats Up and
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Lane. They were the two senior guys at New Burger,
Speaker 1: and they lived up to their promises. They were great people.
Speaker 1: New Burger then went on to sell New Burger Berman
Speaker 1: to Lehman Brothers and so That was an interesting point
Speaker 1: in my career because I had worked at Goldman Sachs
Speaker 1: and now we were all migrating over to Lehman Brothers.
Speaker 1: And I became a managing director of Lehman Brothers in
Speaker 1: October of two thousand and three. You know, we we
Speaker 1: had Jack Rivkin on the show some months ago. He
Speaker 1: was at Lehman, left more or less, got fired, joined
Speaker 1: New Burger, joined New Burger, and ends up coming back
Speaker 1: to UH Actually his time at Lehman the first time
Speaker 1: became a Harvard Business School. He took them from last
Speaker 1: to first place the research similar situation ends up at
Speaker 1: New Burger along with your friends. Gary Kaminsky was a
Speaker 1: New Burger for and his dad, Gary and his dad
Speaker 1: and his brother Michael and Gary Kamitsky, and I go
Speaker 1: back to two where one of his best friends from
Speaker 1: the town Ulit that he grew up in was one
Speaker 1: of my roommates in college at Tufts. So I've known
Speaker 1: Gary forever um and it was really a lot of
Speaker 1: fun to work with Gary at Newburger. So in the
Speaker 1: last thirty seconds we have how can you compare the
Speaker 1: culture at Lehman with the culture of Goldman Sachs very
Speaker 1: very different places. Uh these things he evolved differently over time.
Speaker 1: So I'll just talk about the culture. I remember at
Speaker 1: Goldman inclusive, team oriented. The pronoun use was we, the
Speaker 1: pronoun use was our, uh, and you had to pass
Speaker 1: the ball. You did way better Lehman. They had one
Speaker 1: eye on the outside world and they had one They
Speaker 1: had one gun trained to the outside world, and they
Speaker 1: had one gun trained on each other. You see that.
Speaker 1: That's a little bit more divisive. You kill to play
Speaker 1: sort of. And the other problem they had, and I
Speaker 1: do respect them, and I'm sorry that they're gone, but
Speaker 1: the other problem that they had they had Goldman Sachs envy.
Speaker 1: Well so did everybody else. They'd sit at the conference
Speaker 1: table and say, well, we're just as good as Goldman
Speaker 1: as this, We're just as good as Goldman at dad,
Speaker 1: And I remember thinking, hey, who cares what you're just
Speaker 1: as good at. Focus on yourselves and let's not have
Speaker 1: this relative comparison. I think it's a good message for
Speaker 1: younger people about their own lives. Right If if you're
Speaker 1: at a conference table when someone is saying that over
Speaker 1: and over again, the potential client is thinking themselves, maybe
Speaker 1: I should check out Goldman. My days were numbered. When
Speaker 1: I raised my hand at an m D meeting, I said, guys,
Speaker 1: why are we so focused on Goldman? I can guarantee
Speaker 1: that they're not that focused on you. And that was
Speaker 1: that was not a politically astute thing to say at
Speaker 1: that moment, but it was honest that it was true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, that was another reason why I had
Speaker 1: to look on and see if I could start another company.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Ridhult. You're listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Anthony Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about your early days at Goldman,
Speaker 1: and I recall way back. You're telling a story that
Speaker 1: I found absolutely fascinating about when you were rotating through
Speaker 1: of the different departments and you found a sort of,
Speaker 1: if I memory serves correctly, a kind of orphaned deal
Speaker 1: that people really kind of were neglecting with some startup
Speaker 1: company called Dell Computer. Well, Dell at that time wasn't
Speaker 1: a startup, you know. Michael started the business and eight
Speaker 1: four uh he in college, he went public and eighty
Speaker 1: eight through Goldman Sachs. In the summer of three, Michael
Speaker 1: had gotten into a little bit of trouble with his
Speaker 1: laptops the introduction of his laptops. The batteries weren't working well. Uh,
Speaker 1: they were actually catching fire, and he had to stop
Speaker 1: the production and he had a little bit of a
Speaker 1: cash bleed and a little bit of a spin out. There.
Speaker 1: One thing Michael Dell said to me, in order to
Speaker 1: become Michael Dell and Dell Computer Corporation, there were about
Speaker 1: eight thousand decisions that he had to make and he
Speaker 1: had to get about seven thousand, nine hundred of them right.
Speaker 1: And it's an interesting thing. And so he was in
Speaker 1: a tailspin. And one of his best skills, he's incredibly
Speaker 1: commercial guy, was that he needed a little bit of help.
Speaker 1: He need a little bit of financing and so and
Speaker 1: this isn't so long after they had the currency issue
Speaker 1: that the currency hedge, and basically that was a commodation
Speaker 1: to dead bet and it wasn't what Michael did. But
Speaker 1: what can we call it? I can't call him Michael,
Speaker 1: but you you know, listen, I I call him Michael,
Speaker 1: but you know he is Mr Dell. I mean, the
Speaker 1: guy is a masterful guy. He should be on your
Speaker 1: show way more than me. But but to tell you
Speaker 1: this story, it's twenty two years ago, but I remember
Speaker 1: it very well. It was mid August, most of Wall
Speaker 1: Street was on vacation. Michael came into the conference room.
Speaker 1: I got called into a meeting by one of the
Speaker 1: capital markets people. I was on the institutional sales desk
Speaker 1: at the time, looking over the deal UH. And then
Speaker 1: they asked me, look, we're gonna put a convertible bond together.
Speaker 1: Do you think some of your clients would have an
Speaker 1: interest in this convertible bond? And I went out and
Speaker 1: call several white guys who were on vacation. I said, listen,
Speaker 1: this thing has a very low premium meanings will convert
Speaker 1: into a lot of equity. It has a high coupon UH,
Speaker 1: and I really think this is a good deal. And
Speaker 1: people looked at the financials and said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the financials a little shaky. I said, they are a
Speaker 1: little shaky, but this guy is not shaky. This is
Speaker 1: a betting. Michael is a steward of this business. All
Speaker 1: businesses go through some hiccups. This is an opportune time.
Speaker 1: When he gets this cash onto his balance sheet, He's
Speaker 1: gonna retool the product cycle. He's gonna freshen up and
Speaker 1: strengthen his balance sheet, and I think you guys gotta
Speaker 1: make this investment. And so long story short, and listen,
Speaker 1: this is a team approach. I'm out here running the
Speaker 1: flag up for myself, but Goldman Sachs went out and
Speaker 1: raised him. Uh. I don't know. It had to be
Speaker 1: about two and fifty million dollars a lot of money
Speaker 1: at that time. UH, and Dell went off to the races.
Speaker 1: If you look at that short, one of the great
Speaker 1: stocks of the ninete andies from the apple of its death, no,
Speaker 1: no question. And one of my institutional investors who I'm
Speaker 1: still very very close to, just retired from the Alfred P.
Speaker 1: Sloan Foundation. His name is Bill Peterson. UH remembers that
Speaker 1: deal fondly because he said it was the top performing
Speaker 1: name for him over a five year period of time
Speaker 1: that he held the stock. And so a combination, like
Speaker 1: I said earlier in our conversation, a little bit of
Speaker 1: providential luck, good timing, But that helped me build a
Speaker 1: relationship with Michael, and I just have an enormous respect
Speaker 1: for him. Was speaking with Anthony Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital,
Speaker 1: talking about the time Goldman Sachs essentially rescued Dell Computers.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about Michael Dell. He's
Speaker 1: been fairly active. Um, not so much him, but MSK
Speaker 1: Ventures is MST ms D m s K is the
Speaker 1: whole something else. MSD Michael S. Dell UM is a
Speaker 1: fairly substantial venture cap role operation. Are you still in
Speaker 1: touch with him much? Do you? How often do you
Speaker 1: bump into it? I'm actually in touch with him less. Uh.
Speaker 1: I see him once in a while at the World
Speaker 1: Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He's obviously super busy raising
Speaker 1: his family as m I, and he's got deaf and
Speaker 1: he's also taken del He's got a private company that
Speaker 1: he's dealing with now, which I predicted some point we'll
Speaker 1: probably go public again. But MSD Capital is I think
Speaker 1: a very diversified UH portfolio. In addition to venture private equity,
Speaker 1: they've got long portfolio, fixed income portfolio, and him and
Speaker 1: his team there have done a masterful job of managing
Speaker 1: his money. And I'm pretty sure they've taken into outside
Speaker 1: money at this point. Are we gonna see Michael Dell
Speaker 1: at a SAULT conference anytime? So you know, we haven't
Speaker 1: gone in the CEO direction, but you know he's a
Speaker 1: terrific guy to have it an event like that. So
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about Skybridge Capital because we
Speaker 1: really haven't touched on that. UM. That was post Lehman
Speaker 1: when you decided, all right, I've had enough of this,
Speaker 1: I've offended all the right people. It's time to make
Speaker 1: head for the exit. You launched Skybridge Capital in what
Speaker 1: year was that? It was March March of two thousand
Speaker 1: and five five, and so I had worked at Lehman
Speaker 1: from October of two thousand three to March of two
Speaker 1: thousand five. UM, a lot of guys were departing from
Speaker 1: the Lehman senior management team. I went to the guy
Speaker 1: that I was working for. I said, listen, I didn't
Speaker 1: grow up here in this organization. Guys that are in
Speaker 1: I was forty one at the time, and I said,
Speaker 1: you guys that have grown up here twenty years that
Speaker 1: are now in your forties are super tight with each other.
Speaker 1: I'm not in yourr an outsider within. I'm an outsider.
Speaker 1: These guys had a strong culture and it was a
Speaker 1: good culture, different from Goldman and but you have a
Speaker 1: little bit of an immune system because I'm transplanted in
Speaker 1: from new Berger Berman so and I'm doing renunal rejection.
Speaker 1: Rejected tissue. Is that I was rejected tissue and no problem.
Speaker 1: It could have been personality issues too. But but but
Speaker 1: but in fairness of them, well, but you know, I
Speaker 1: know you long enough that I know you're kinda you
Speaker 1: get along with pretty much everybody. You know, you're really
Speaker 1: rubbed that many people when you're when you're opinionated in
Speaker 1: a politically correct or politically neutral organization. Uh that's uh, well,
Speaker 1: you know what your your elbows for somebody like you
Speaker 1: or me or elbows may not be that sharp given
Speaker 1: the neighborhoods that we both grew up here. But when
Speaker 1: you're in that sort of corporate environment where everybody's wearing
Speaker 1: a white shirt, Uh, you know, and you have an opinion,
Speaker 1: it may not be something that people super like about you.
Speaker 1: And so I think the more successful guys, and God
Speaker 1: blessed them, they have a way of talking and a
Speaker 1: way of navigating those situations that you know, I wasn't
Speaker 1: super successful at. Having said that, Uh, Richard s Fold
Speaker 1: Dick Fold do have an enormous amount of respect for Uh.
Speaker 1: He gave me ten million dollars a balance sheet capital
Speaker 1: put it into our fund. A gentleman by the name
Speaker 1: of Jared Way he helped me get that done. He
Speaker 1: was on the senior relationship management team there at Lehman,
Speaker 1: so they see you very much. Day Goldman's seeds outgoing
Speaker 1: traders as well. They did. They put ten million dollars
Speaker 1: of their balance sheet into our fund, which helped me
Speaker 1: get the catalyzation. If you will have that fund started.
Speaker 1: And I'm Barry Ridhults. You're listening to Masters in Business
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is Anthony Scaramucci
Speaker 1: of Skybridge Capital. Anthony is the gentleman behind the resurrection
Speaker 1: of an iconic television show, Lewis Rukaiser. Wall Street Week
Speaker 1: with Louis Rukaiser was on for twentysomething years, thirty years.
Speaker 1: It's how a lot of people today of our generation,
Speaker 1: or maybe a few years younger, first discovered investing Wall
Speaker 1: Street stocks back in the day. What made you think
Speaker 1: of bringing the show back. It's an amazing show and
Speaker 1: I've seen almost all of the film library a half
Speaker 1: hour show over thirty five years. Lewis Rukaiser, classic guy.
Speaker 1: I think He was a master at explaining complex things
Speaker 1: in a way that regular people outside of our industry
Speaker 1: battery can understand. And I don't want to say simplify them,
Speaker 1: because these are very complex things, and sometimes when you
Speaker 1: try to simplify something complex, you really don't get it
Speaker 1: at all. He never dumbed it down. He just gave
Speaker 1: He gave it rust in the viewer to but Button
Speaker 1: made it understandable. Liz Ane Sanders was on our show
Speaker 1: this past week. Had a great story where she was
Speaker 1: very nervous the first time she met lu She was
Speaker 1: sitting in the chair. He said, are your parents in
Speaker 1: our business? And she said no. He says, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what we're gonna go on the air in a
Speaker 1: few minutes, but I want you to talk to your parents.
Speaker 1: I want you to explain the concepts that we're discussing
Speaker 1: to your mom and dad. If you do that, we're
Speaker 1: gonna have a terrific show. And that's the spirit of
Speaker 1: what we're trying to capture with the return of Wall Street.
Speaker 1: So Wall Street Week, that's so, that's funny you mentioned
Speaker 1: that because my wife's an our teacher. My mother was
Speaker 1: a real estate agent, and that was always the goal. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you can make a real estate agent and an
Speaker 1: art teacher, if you can remove the jargon and speak
Speaker 1: in ways that they can understand it well, then anybody
Speaker 1: can understand it. And and and this is a good
Speaker 1: segue because I do think that some of the punditry
Speaker 1: on business television is intimidating, and some of the punditry
Speaker 1: on business telligence is for the impression of other pundits.
Speaker 1: They want to impress each other while they're talking to
Speaker 1: each other. And so what Louis Rukeyser did was he
Speaker 1: waxed away all of that stuff barr and he really
Speaker 1: just tried to deliver high, thoughtful content. And so that
Speaker 1: show laid dormant for about ten years. UH. Gentleman by
Speaker 1: name of Jeff Salkin had actually bought the rights to
Speaker 1: the show. He had a website up called Wall Street
Speaker 1: Week um, and but he had not really figured out
Speaker 1: how to bring the show back on the year and
Speaker 1: to transform the brand. UH. And so he came to
Speaker 1: see eight. I had a conversation with him, UH and
Speaker 1: Maryland Public Television, and I acquired the brand from him
Speaker 1: and Matt Brand and the library. That's correct. So it's
Speaker 1: the access to the archives and the library. It's the
Speaker 1: likeness of Mr Ruth Kaiser, it's the great computer fond
Speaker 1: digital digitization of the logo. UH. And it's also the website,
Speaker 1: the Twitter page, the Facebook page. UM. This stuff I
Speaker 1: think will be usually valuable if we handle it right.
Speaker 1: From an auditorial perspective, I want to try to explain
Speaker 1: to people what's going on. I think since your Bailout
Speaker 1: Nation best seller, I think the average American is super
Speaker 1: intimidated by the markets, super intimidated by the volatility. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're uncertain. Uh, they're uh stashed in cash if you will.
Speaker 1: And I think that it just came out more than
Speaker 1: half of Americans have zero dollars exposed. So you're you're
Speaker 1: supporting my thesis, and yet we both know that the
Speaker 1: nation is undersaved. We're probably underslept, and we're probably overfed.
Speaker 1: We've got all the dials on our dashboard wrong. And
Speaker 1: so what we want to try to do is deliver
Speaker 1: a message to the average American that there's a simple
Speaker 1: and easy way to boost your savings, take more financial
Speaker 1: control of your life. UH, put yourself on the arc
Speaker 1: of the aspirational society that we all want to live
Speaker 1: in and that requires you to take a little bit
Speaker 1: of risk in the stock market in a balanced way.
Speaker 1: It requires you to have the right fixed income exposure
Speaker 1: and portfolio um and to be patient. And you know
Speaker 1: you could you could spare yourself a latte a week.
Speaker 1: That's five dollars a week. That's two underd and sixty
Speaker 1: dollars a year and lo and beholds you're building a
Speaker 1: little nestag so you can work at Bloomberg in this
Speaker 1: free Well, that's another great show about Bloomberg. Let me
Speaker 1: ask you a question about that archive. Are you gonna
Speaker 1: any plans to put that online? What are you gonna
Speaker 1: do with all these So so if you go to
Speaker 1: Wall Street week dot com, you will see archival uh
Speaker 1: stuff on the on the on on there. We also
Speaker 1: have it up on YouTube. We're we're finding new nuggets,
Speaker 1: new treasure every single day as we mind that archive.
Speaker 1: So you just had Jeff Gunlock and Liz and Saunders
Speaker 1: were two names I recognized last week. John, Well you
Speaker 1: have coming up in the coming weeks. Well, uh where
Speaker 1: if you look at the SALT conference list, it will
Speaker 1: give you a really good cross section of what we're
Speaker 1: trying to do. We want uh, policymakers, hedge fund managers,
Speaker 1: we want possibly actors, music composers. You say, jeez, why
Speaker 1: do you want that? Well, you know what, everybody in
Speaker 1: that group has a financial plan. And what the am
Speaker 1: mortal lou Ro Kaiser would say to you is that
Speaker 1: the show has to be about the way the world works,
Speaker 1: because your money world and the way the world works
Speaker 1: are completely intersected. And we know that from federal reserve policy,
Speaker 1: we know that from governmental policy. And so I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try to bring a very broad cross section of guests
Speaker 1: to the program. I'm Barry Ridholtz. You're listening to Masters
Speaker 1: in Business on Bloombug Radio. My guest today is Anthony
Speaker 1: Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital and Wall Street Week. Let's let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about Skybridge Capital. It's become quite successful.
Speaker 1: It originally began as a hedge fund seating shop. Is
Speaker 1: that right? You were looking to identify emerging managers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my my original concept and for the entrepreneurs out there,
Speaker 1: what happens is you start with a plan and then
Speaker 1: you have contact with the enemy and you have to
Speaker 1: switch your plan. And so I had and that's the
Speaker 1: great Mohammad was it um. Mike Tyson said, everybody has
Speaker 1: planned to the punch in the face, and so most
Speaker 1: generals know once they have contact with the enemy, the
Speaker 1: plan goes out the wayside. But but for me, I
Speaker 1: had a seating idea. I was gonna back early stage managers,
Speaker 1: take GP steaks in them, and then uh literally have
Speaker 1: our LPs participate in the growth of the earning streams
Speaker 1: of these managers. Great looking on paper, but it's a
Speaker 1: little bit like a venture capital situation, and seed hundreds
Speaker 1: of them. To find that we didn't have enough money
Speaker 1: to seed hundreds of them, we seeded ten. We seeded
Speaker 1: them in the years two thousand and six and seven,
Speaker 1: the early part of two thousand eight, so we were
Speaker 1: in a barrel going over Niagara Falls and so uh.
Speaker 1: Which interesting is that one of those funds is doing
Speaker 1: quite well today, which you still we stole own a
Speaker 1: small interest in. But that seating business itself, we had
Speaker 1: to make a decision to dismantle it. And so I
Speaker 1: was By the way, the tech folks h call that
Speaker 1: a pivot. So you pivoted from seed in. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: an elegant way to say that you're failing and got
Speaker 1: to come up with some other idea. And so so
Speaker 1: that's what we had to do. And I'll tell you
Speaker 1: that our seating business, I would describe it as the
Speaker 1: old movie Apole thirteen. It was a successful failure in
Speaker 1: the sense that the seating business was the lunar module
Speaker 1: that we lived in as we tried to figure out
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do to crawl back into the command
Speaker 1: module and get back to Earth. And so, uh, we
Speaker 1: had a bleeding asset, tons of redemptions, and there was
Speaker 1: a period barrier looking straight in the face and tell
Speaker 1: you that I thought we were going out of business.
Speaker 1: And I remember in March of two thousand nine, with
Speaker 1: the dow at about six d the SMP had approximately
Speaker 1: six sixty. I thought, this is it, and uh it was.
Speaker 1: That was a good time we made. We made two
Speaker 1: decisions there. At number one, we started the Salt Conference.
Speaker 1: President Obama said now is not the time to go
Speaker 1: to Las Vegas, and all the TARP recipients canceled their
Speaker 1: conferences on Las Vegas. Uh. That upset the mayor of
Speaker 1: the city. I called him Oscar Goodman, and I said, listen,
Speaker 1: I want to bring a hedge fund conference to your
Speaker 1: great city. And so he put me in touch with
Speaker 1: Michael Milken. He put me in touch with the former governor.
Speaker 1: I got to meet Steve Winn and we put the
Speaker 1: first Salt conference is it may have two thousand nine
Speaker 1: in the Encore Hotel, which is part of the Wind Complex.
Speaker 1: I tell the story that way because we were really
Speaker 1: on our knees and I thought, okay, maybe we all
Speaker 1: go into the conference business. There's a huge void in
Speaker 1: these things. Uh. And people said to me, well, how
Speaker 1: is the conference business tie into your seating business. I
Speaker 1: didn't have a great answer, but I knew that there
Speaker 1: was an opportunity. I said, well, maybe we'll have a
Speaker 1: lot of hedge funds there and we could populate our
Speaker 1: seating business. But what it really turned out to be, Uh,
Speaker 1: it turned out to be a great networking opportunity. And
Speaker 1: in the network I discovered that City Bank needed to
Speaker 1: sell many of its non core assets. So let's let's
Speaker 1: put this into the right context, because I really love
Speaker 1: this story. So it's in the midst of the financial crisis.
Speaker 1: We're bottoming. But you know, three or four people, me
Speaker 1: and two other guys know, but nobody else. Nobody else
Speaker 1: got They've got a plastic mouth brace that I've just
Speaker 1: had molded from my teeth. Because I'm in the middle,
Speaker 1: and I've been told by many of my former colleagues
Speaker 1: at Goldman and Lehman that you know you're you're going
Speaker 1: out of business life demon you're done. But they were
Speaker 1: probably right, But courage stand there. But that's a fantastic
Speaker 1: opportunity that you capitalize. In hindsight, it was a fantastic opportunity.
Speaker 1: At the time, many people had passed on the deal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they they had put the fund of Funds unit
Speaker 1: into what's called City Holdings, which was their place for
Speaker 1: dissolution or disposition, and so it was very hard for
Speaker 1: that terrific asset management team to more eight billion dollar
Speaker 1: how much money was in that well, No, at that
Speaker 1: time there was one billion dollars of discretionary money in
Speaker 1: that portfolio. I went to Michael Corbett, who has become
Speaker 1: a personal friend. He's a terrific guy. He was running
Speaker 1: City Holdings at the time. I wanted to buy his
Speaker 1: seating business. Another big lesson to our listeners, think way
Speaker 1: bigger than that. He looked at me and said, Hey,
Speaker 1: I can't sell you that seating business. I can sell
Speaker 1: you the entire fund of funds business. And I blinked
Speaker 1: and gulped and probably blanched white, and said, oh my god,
Speaker 1: how am I gonna pay for that? But I looked
Speaker 1: at him with a poker face and said, you're on.
Speaker 1: I'd like to buy that business. And so it was
Speaker 1: at a desperation. It was a hail Mary pass late
Speaker 1: in the fourth quarter. But all of that money that
Speaker 1: I earned from the sale of our first business to
Speaker 1: new Burger Berman, I liquidated those assets and I brought
Speaker 1: them to Bear to buy the thing from City Bank.
Speaker 1: I told my oldest son, whatever in errorge, you thought
Speaker 1: you were getting from your dad, Well you're now long
Speaker 1: skybirds through your eyeballs. You better hope I don't blow
Speaker 1: up the bridge. And so we got that deal done
Speaker 1: on the thirty of June two thousand and ten. Brought
Speaker 1: twenty four people over. Uh. It's five years later, twenty
Speaker 1: three of those twenty four people are still with us.
Speaker 1: We've add more personnel. Our discretionary assets went from a
Speaker 1: billion dollars under management to nine point three billion in
Speaker 1: the five year period of time. And because there was
Speaker 1: a void in the conference space. Our conference also has
Speaker 1: done reasonably well over that period. Okay, so now I
Speaker 1: have to throw a yellow card on you because your
Speaker 1: conference hasn't done reasonably well quote unquote. So you mentioned
Speaker 1: my book. It came out in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: and you had me out to Vegas to be on
Speaker 1: a panel with Austin Goulsby, who was the former former
Speaker 1: Council of Economic Advisor chairman. I forget the Congressman's and
Speaker 1: a few other people on that panel, and I have
Speaker 1: to tell you that was one of the hottest conferences
Speaker 1: I had ever gone to. You had Bill Clinton as
Speaker 1: I'm getting the yellow car because I'm understanding, totally understanding,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't. By the way, Bill Clinton listeners the
Speaker 1: halfway like me. Remember I'm a hedge fund guy, so
Speaker 1: I'm obviously a social pariah out the viewers the listeners
Speaker 1: are sort of like me. Well, but you're you're as
Speaker 1: an individual, you're fairly charming a character. As a character,
Speaker 1: I think people who you call yourself the mooch, not
Speaker 1: a lot of people. That was a that was a
Speaker 1: high school football name. My last name, Scaramuci, not you
Speaker 1: people call me the mooch, But some of the guests
Speaker 1: you've had at Sault. So this year is Ben bernanke. Yes.
Speaker 1: The year I was on a panel, it was Bill Clinton.
Speaker 1: The year after it was George Bush. I remember Bill Clinton,
Speaker 1: not that far removed from quadruple bypass, walking into a
Speaker 1: very hostile room of about hedge fund managers. And basically
Speaker 1: by the time he was done, if he would have
Speaker 1: said and that's why I'm running for president and I
Speaker 1: wanted you to write a fifty check, he would have
Speaker 1: would have walked out of that room with twenty millions up.
Speaker 1: Super popular guy, not only here in the United States
Speaker 1: but globally. But I will tell you this, President Clinton
Speaker 1: made our conference unbelieved because because in in two thousand
Speaker 1: nine we had a smaller conference, uh, four people. We
Speaker 1: then said, okay, let's go big. And that's the magic
Speaker 1: of life. You gotta think really big home go big.
Speaker 1: And so I told the guys, we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: go after President Clinton. See if we can get him. Uh.
Speaker 1: He had a guy working firm by the name of
Speaker 1: Doug Band and very nice guy. Uh, And we signed
Speaker 1: him up pursuing to dates that work for the president.
Speaker 1: And I will tell you very upfront. He made our
Speaker 1: conference because he credentialized the type of speakers that we
Speaker 1: wanted to get, and so it was easier to get
Speaker 1: President Bush, it was easier to get Governor Romney, it
Speaker 1: was easier to get Chairman Ben BERNANKI, Uh, Secretary Rice,
Speaker 1: We've got most of the secretaries of Defense. We've had
Speaker 1: General Petrays, We're bringing General Keith Alexander this year, Yankees.
Speaker 1: So we're really trying to bring people who we think
Speaker 1: other people in our industry want to hear from and
Speaker 1: to learn from. And so we've also cross section this thing.
Speaker 1: So we've had people like al Pacino, We've had all
Speaker 1: of our stone. We did the movie with you had
Speaker 1: the guy that Catch Me If You Can was based
Speaker 1: on That was one of the most fascinating conversations, great
Speaker 1: great guys. How fascinating was that? Uh Frank Abig Nelly,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry that's announced his name, but that was a
Speaker 1: fascinating speech. That was a great story about redemption. It
Speaker 1: was a great story about the mistakes that he made
Speaker 1: in his life and how he tried to set his
Speaker 1: life right um and failure in redemption. I think it's
Speaker 1: a classic American thing. I think one of the things,
Speaker 1: one of the big advantages our country has over these
Speaker 1: other countries, that we accept people who are willing to
Speaker 1: take enormous amounts of risk. Uh, they can fail, dust
Speaker 1: themselves off and restored. This is the reason we Ford
Speaker 1: in his fifties, it was like a sixth or eighth coup.
Speaker 1: Look at look at Sam Walton forty six years old.
Speaker 1: Two failed stores started Walt what became Walmart when he
Speaker 1: was forty six, and so the greatest many of the
Speaker 1: to stupendous things about our country, but one of the
Speaker 1: greatest things is the culture to accept risk takers, to
Speaker 1: accept failure. It's the reason why Facebook is invented here,
Speaker 1: Google is invented here. Apple started here talking about failure
Speaker 1: and redemption. Jobs gets fired, comes back well. We showed
Speaker 1: a great scene from him in being interviewed by the
Speaker 1: late Louis ru Keiser talking to Steve should he dismantle
Speaker 1: the company or should he try to grow it? And
Speaker 1: Steve was gung ho. He said, I'm coming back to
Speaker 1: create a new spirit of innovation. We were ten years
Speaker 1: ahead of our competitors back in the day. My goal
Speaker 1: is to get us ten years ahead of our competitors Again,
Speaker 1: it's a brilliant commentary about what you need to do
Speaker 1: in life. Thank big or go home. We've been speaking
Speaker 1: with Anthony Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital about the Salt Conference.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy these conversations, be sure and check out
Speaker 1: the rest of our chat. You can find that on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com or on Apple iTunes. Be shouldn't check
Speaker 1: out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com or
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at Ridholts Anthony. Where can people
Speaker 1: find you? If they want to, they can find me
Speaker 1: at a Scaramucci at Skybridge Capital dot com. Uh. They
Speaker 1: can also go to Wall Street week dot com and
Speaker 1: they can toggle the prosper at Wall Street week dot com.
Speaker 1: That's all the viewer emails or commentary about the website.
Speaker 1: I read every one of those and so and I
Speaker 1: try to respond to them as well. And your Twitter
Speaker 1: handle is my Twitter handles at Scaramucci. Easy enough. I'm
Speaker 1: Barry Ridhults. You've been listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. Welcome back to the podcast on Barry Ridholts,
Speaker 1: and my guest today is Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony and I
Speaker 1: know each other over the years from the street. It's
Speaker 1: not exactly a big place. Let me fantastic book, Bailout Nation,
Speaker 1: thank you. Let me give you a little little background
Speaker 1: on on who Anthony is and how he got to
Speaker 1: be where he is today. Undergraduate of Toughs, graduate degree
Speaker 1: in economics onto Harvard Law, which is uh interesting that
Speaker 1: you took the Harvard Law degree straight to Goldman Sachs
Speaker 1: and from Goldman Sacks you eventually left to set up
Speaker 1: your own funds, which long story short brought by new
Speaker 1: Berg and Berman, which eventually was brought by Lehman. So
Speaker 1: you've really been pretty well versed all over the street.
Speaker 1: Well less has been a blessed career, and you know,
Speaker 1: as a fellow entrepreneur that a lot of your success
Speaker 1: is providential. You certainly have to work hard, you have
Speaker 1: to relate to people well, but at the end of
Speaker 1: the day you get a couple of lucky breaks too
Speaker 1: that helps your career slow. I'm still I'm still working
Speaker 1: on that relating to people well part. But the lucky
Speaker 1: you have the radio show, I'm just the gags. You
Speaker 1: must be doing a good job relating to people. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm just curious. So that and you're a perfect person
Speaker 1: to ask a question a bunch of questions to to
Speaker 1: save that curiosity. So let me start right off the bat.
Speaker 1: Harvard Law is a very storied institution, a very specific culture.
Speaker 1: As his Goldman Sacks, a very different institution and a
Speaker 1: very different culture. What was that transition like going to
Speaker 1: law school say I'm gonna be a lawyer and ending
Speaker 1: up Well, I had a you know, an interesting background.
Speaker 1: My parents ever went to college. You're real come from
Speaker 1: a middle class come from a middle class family. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would never disrespect my parents by telling you I
Speaker 1: grew up poor, because I did not grow up poor.
Speaker 1: We were resoundingly in the middle class. We had plenty
Speaker 1: of food, clothing, air conditioning, heat. My dad was a
Speaker 1: very Yeah we did. Actually that's why my hair is
Speaker 1: so straight. But we we we had a narrow casted
Speaker 1: view of the world. I didn't take the s a
Speaker 1: t prep at Stanley Kaplan. I didn't really have a
Speaker 1: good idea of what was going on for college placement. Uh.
Speaker 1: My dad was working at a place called Gotham Sand
Speaker 1: and Stone on Long Island. Uh. He built a relationship
Speaker 1: with a gentleman that had gone to Toughs University and
Speaker 1: the gentleman's name is Billy Tamasah. He's he's passed on now.
Speaker 1: He's a terrific guy. My father came home one night
Speaker 1: and said, you and your brother you're going to Toughs University. Uh,
Speaker 1: we thought it was spelled t O U g H.
Speaker 1: We had no idea what it was. My brother my
Speaker 1: brothers a couple of years older than me. He looked
Speaker 1: in the baron's book and he said, Dad, this thing
Speaker 1: is most selective. I don't know how we're gonna get
Speaker 1: in there. He said, well, you both have good grades.
Speaker 1: My friend Billy said he went there and he loved it.
Speaker 1: That's where you're going to school. I said, well, I
Speaker 1: don't know is it that easy? We both applied. My
Speaker 1: brother is a couple of years older than me. He applied,
Speaker 1: got into U University, liked it, and I said, okay,
Speaker 1: So I applied to a couple of schools, got into
Speaker 1: US University, And now what do you want to do
Speaker 1: with your career? Well, you know, I had no idea.
Speaker 1: I read in a magazine article that lawyers A Crevass,
Speaker 1: Swain and more in we're making sixty five thousand U
Speaker 1: S dollars a year. I said, oh my god. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's about what my dad is now making.
Speaker 1: And I said, I can get out of law school
Speaker 1: and make almost as much money as my dad and
Speaker 1: have this incredible life. I guess I thought sixty five
Speaker 1: dollars a year it was more money than I could
Speaker 1: ever want or need. So, very simplicitally, Barry, I applied
Speaker 1: to seven law schools, uh, and I got into Harvard.
Speaker 1: Harvard's down the block from Toss. I went down there
Speaker 1: and made it a deposit. Right once you get into Harvard,
Speaker 1: that's pretty much. Uh. The other options really fade unless
Speaker 1: you're looking to specialize in something unusual. That's the story is.
Speaker 1: So now I'm at Harvard and it's dawning on me
Speaker 1: that I'm not well suited to be a lawyer, and
Speaker 1: so always always an interesting time to discover that in
Speaker 1: your second was it How soon did you realize that?
Speaker 1: Because it took me. It's about my second year law school.
Speaker 1: Pretty cool, I said, yeah, I don't want to be
Speaker 1: a lawyer. Well, this is another classic mid eighties story.
Speaker 1: You can't do this now because of the post nine
Speaker 1: eleven security. But I decided that I was going to
Speaker 1: be a Wall Street lawyer, and so once I put
Speaker 1: the deposit down at Harvard, I went to their placement area.
Speaker 1: I asked for their placement book. Uh. Not knowing a
Speaker 1: lot about how the world works, I thought Wall Street
Speaker 1: lawyers lived on Wall Street, and so I opened up
Speaker 1: the book. I looked at number one Wall Street, which
Speaker 1: is the old Irving Trust building is now National Landmark.
Speaker 1: It's a law firm there by the name of use
Speaker 1: Hubbard and read and I said, okay, I'm gonna put
Speaker 1: my resume. I typed it up on a Panasonic typewriter.
Speaker 1: I took the number four trained down to uh Wall Street.
Speaker 1: I rode the elevator up to the floor. No security
Speaker 1: walked in there. And I had a list of Harvard
Speaker 1: a lumps that were there, and so I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: is you know Worthington, Babscomb, the thirty second here and then?
Speaker 1: And the woman said yes. I said, well, I'm Antony Scaramuch,
Speaker 1: I'm here to see you. Is he expecting you? I said, well, yes,
Speaker 1: sort of, And she was like, okay, he comes out
Speaker 1: lovely man. I said, sir, I desperately need a job.
Speaker 1: I've got, you know, financially to help me with school,
Speaker 1: not financially more like loans. I said, can you can
Speaker 1: you can you give me a job this summer as
Speaker 1: apparently I'll do anything. So coming to my office, son,
Speaker 1: we sat down, we had a conversation. He says, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll pay you eight dollars an hour. I said, sir,
Speaker 1: could you make it ten? He looked to me, are
Speaker 1: you kidding me? I said, I really need the money.
Speaker 1: Could you make it ten? So I gotta paid ten
Speaker 1: dollars an hour. I worked seventy hours a week. Uh.
Speaker 1: This was back in the day where Continental Airlines was
Speaker 1: buying People's Express, which was a new work based discount airliner.
Speaker 1: And I worked on that merger all summer and I
Speaker 1: remember thinking to myself, oh my god, this I'm not
Speaker 1: well suited for this um And so I went to
Speaker 1: Harvard Law School thinking I was not going to be
Speaker 1: a lawyer. Thanksgiving Day, I told my parents that I
Speaker 1: wanted to leave law school. Now. When I was going
Speaker 1: to Harvard, my mother thought it was Hartford Law School.
Speaker 1: So when we were packing the car, she said, uh,
Speaker 1: we're going to Hartford. I said, no, mo bus, she said,
Speaker 1: We're gonna We're gonna Cambridge. She says, no, no, No,
Speaker 1: he's in't Harvard Law School and Hartford. I said, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's Harvard and Harvard are very different. And so anyways,
Speaker 1: my parents didn't care whether it was Harvard Law School
Speaker 1: or Harvard Law School. They wanted their son to be
Speaker 1: a lawyer. And so when I told my mom I
Speaker 1: wanted to quit law school like a Jewish mother, by yeah,
Speaker 1: the Italian, I forget about it. It was a very
Speaker 1: historionic event. I said, no problem, I'll finish law school.
Speaker 1: And then I was something else, desperately seeking a job,
Speaker 1: and so I read it several articles about Goldman. Uh.
Speaker 1: But I made a classic career mistake that young people
Speaker 1: make is that I went for what I thought was
Speaker 1: the coolest and the hottest job. Maybe that's a job
Speaker 1: at Google today, maybe that's a job at Facebook. But
Speaker 1: back in our day, the hottest, coolest job was investment
Speaker 1: banking or McKenzie consulting. And uh, even better than that,
Speaker 1: because the real estate market was super hot to be
Speaker 1: a real estate investment banker. And so you know, I
Speaker 1: wanted to be the kid at the Harvard graduation, at
Speaker 1: the cocktail party to tell people I got the hottest
Speaker 1: and the coolest job, and so I went and sought
Speaker 1: that job, got that job. I went to that party
Speaker 1: and bragged about it with my amazing insecurity at that time.
Speaker 1: I went to work at Goldman Sacks, and eighteen months
Speaker 1: later I was summarily fired. I got fired from Goldman Sacks.
Speaker 1: I'm February one. I started there in August fourte uh.
Speaker 1: And the purpose of the reason I got fired was
Speaker 1: three reasons. Super uh terrible at the job. Number one.
Speaker 1: Number two, we were going into a real estate recession
Speaker 1: and the firm was making extreme cutback and the combination
Speaker 1: of me not being even though he was working very hard,
Speaker 1: I didn't have the skill set and the recession. Uh.
Speaker 1: They gave me a pink slip to give me an
Speaker 1: eleven thousand dollar severance check, and they told me I
Speaker 1: had to leave, and I was devastated. I can imagine
Speaker 1: by the way, I'm gonna say this now, there's all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff you said. First, I'm gonna flip he's
Speaker 1: got like nine phones and they're all lighting up with emails. First,
Speaker 1: I think you're very very self effacing and understating some
Speaker 1: of the things that you've done. So the story I
Speaker 1: heard with you and Dell was that it was the
Speaker 1: middle of the summer, and nobody at Goldman was really
Speaker 1: paying attention that in the scheme of things, that hundred
Speaker 1: fifty or two was a relatively small deal and there
Speaker 1: were bigger fish to fry. There were multibillion dollar mergers.
Speaker 1: There was all sorts of stuff going on, and that
Speaker 1: was I don't want to say orphan, because Goldman Sex
Speaker 1: doesn't orphan a deal, but there was a lot of other, hotter,
Speaker 1: bigger things going on. But it's not really me being
Speaker 1: self effacing, because you have to understand the machinery and
Speaker 1: the capability of Goldman Sacks today in if if I
Speaker 1: was not at the firm, that deal would have happened
Speaker 1: with with or without me. And I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: in itself effacing way. I'm just talking about the wonderful
Speaker 1: organization and the uh, the people, the depth of the
Speaker 1: bench at Goldman's ax. But I will say this, I
Speaker 1: took a big liking to Michael Dell, and I admired
Speaker 1: Michael Dell, and I remember teasing him. I said, jeez,
Speaker 1: you know, you did everything wrong. I did everything right.
Speaker 1: And I remember him looking at me, what do you
Speaker 1: mean by that? Anthony. I said, well, I listened to
Speaker 1: my mom and went to college. I listened to my mom.
Speaker 1: I went to law school. You dropped out, You got
Speaker 1: into a fight with your parents over dropping out. You
Speaker 1: were building computers in your dorm room. I was selling
Speaker 1: T shirts. Okay, you went on to be worth a
Speaker 1: go jillion dollars wealthiest. God bless him, and I hope
Speaker 1: he gets the number one. But the point is, you know,
Speaker 1: he was a guy that I really looked up to,
Speaker 1: and I said, you know what, He's gonna turn this
Speaker 1: thing around. And I believed it, and so I definitely
Speaker 1: went out there to try to convince my clients of that.
Speaker 1: So I heard this story third hands from other people,
Speaker 1: and I've asked you about this over the years. So
Speaker 1: the way this story came to me was sort of,
Speaker 1: I don't want to use the word orphan, but not
Speaker 1: the most you know, not the one that was flashing
Speaker 1: red on Goldman's investment banking desk. You kind of found
Speaker 1: it and said, oh, this is a really interesting deal.
Speaker 1: You're the guy that lots of people gave sort of
Speaker 1: a lukewarm Yeah. Well, if you get a lead, which
Speaker 1: is sort of a cowardly thing we all hear when
Speaker 1: you're raising money for something, well, who's the lead, who's
Speaker 1: the who's good, the who's the which means who's the
Speaker 1: guy that's going to do the heavy lifting, the due diligence.
Speaker 1: So I don't look like if it goes south, at
Speaker 1: least I could say, well, look who the lead was.
Speaker 1: They got it wrong also, and that you're the one
Speaker 1: who reached out to people that I believe it was
Speaker 1: t I A Kraft. Well, you know, it's so funny
Speaker 1: you say that because the guy is working at t
Speaker 1: I A Kreft. Now his name is Bill Regal and
Speaker 1: but he's he was they were. The leader was JP Morgan,
Speaker 1: investment manager. Bill's working at Kreft. Now he's a tremendous guy.
Speaker 1: And uh, but that was the lead. That was enough
Speaker 1: to get convinced everybody else. You really, you really did
Speaker 1: do your research, because that's twenty that's twenty two years ago.
Speaker 1: But Bill, Bill looked at the deal, he said, well,
Speaker 1: the financials are pretty crummy, but the story is good.
Speaker 1: I said, well, forget about the story. This guy can
Speaker 1: execute okay. And this business, like most technology businesses, are
Speaker 1: gonna have fits and starts. But he's got a great
Speaker 1: forward game plan, and so you know, and the credit
Speaker 1: goes about at the end of the day. It's one
Speaker 1: thing to serve something up, but this guy had to
Speaker 1: pull the trigger and make the investment. And so but
Speaker 1: you now you're in the sales department. The other guy
Speaker 1: who basically said, hey, there's nothing on Wall Street that's guaranteed.
Speaker 1: This is a home run. This is you have to
Speaker 1: participate in this. What they put in fifty or a
Speaker 1: hundred something like that, and it was ten They did
Speaker 1: ten percent of the deal. And now you're really getting
Speaker 1: me to remember the whole thing. And so once they
Speaker 1: got ten percent of the deal, like you're saying about
Speaker 1: Wall Street, they were a big name anchoring the deal.
Speaker 1: And then people started saying, wait a minute, there might
Speaker 1: be something here, and then orders started flowing. And then
Speaker 1: you've worked in these places and so have I. And
Speaker 1: so what happened was they were anchoring the deal and
Speaker 1: the capital markets people wanted to cut them back on
Speaker 1: the allocation. And so that was a little bit of
Speaker 1: a pushing and shoving match. And somewhat when we've got
Speaker 1: all this somewhat politically incorrect because I got I got
Speaker 1: in there and and roughed it up a little bit.
Speaker 1: Can't you can't do that? Can I do that? And
Speaker 1: so you know, and that was probably not the most
Speaker 1: politically astute thing for me to do, but I really
Speaker 1: felt I needed to be a strong advocate for those
Speaker 1: guys that got in early, and it was the right thing.
Speaker 1: And but but they and they got the full load
Speaker 1: of the allocation, which ended up being a great thing
Speaker 1: for them in their investment portfolio. So so it's an
Speaker 1: interesting story, um, but it goes back to something you
Speaker 1: and I know, and it's a universal truth about business.
Speaker 1: Business is about relationships, and business is about as Buffett says,
Speaker 1: it takes twenty years to build your reputation. But start
Speaker 1: with the principles of fairness, start with the principles of
Speaker 1: doing the right thing for the other guy in the room, uh,
Speaker 1: and not trying to take the last nickel out of something. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you'll see that your career will grow and people
Speaker 1: will make bets on you. So speaking relationship, what was
Speaker 1: your at that point? Like, By the way, the reason
Speaker 1: I know as much as I do about that deal
Speaker 1: is I've described you to people. When people say to me,
Speaker 1: who's this guy Scaramucci. Mooch is the guy who saved
Speaker 1: Dell back in the early nineties. Yeah, I know there's
Speaker 1: a there's a bit of hyperbolea but but that's how
Speaker 1: I describe it. But since you mentioned relationships, what's your
Speaker 1: relationship like subsequent with Michael Dell. Is he involved in
Speaker 1: any of your other deals? He was? He was an
Speaker 1: original investor in Skybridge. Uh. But great anchor. Yeah, great
Speaker 1: Michael rate anchor investment. Uh and uh, very very grateful
Speaker 1: for him for being an original anchor alongside of Merrill
Speaker 1: Lynch and alongside of Lehman brothers. But the the Meryl
Speaker 1: was an investor the first the first couple of investors
Speaker 1: were Michael Dell, uh, Merrill Lynch, uh Lehman. There are
Speaker 1: a few others like that, the the Quate Investment organization. Uh.
Speaker 1: So we had a really good stable list of investors. Um.
Speaker 1: And but Michael is no longer investor because we're out
Speaker 1: of that seating business. And he did a masterful job
Speaker 1: with a group of partners building his own family office,
Speaker 1: which is arguably one of the best family offices in
Speaker 1: the world. And so so he doesn't really need sky
Speaker 1: Bridge to run his money. But we've remained friends. He's
Speaker 1: a very very good guy, incredibly charitable him and his wife.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. I have a prediction which I think
Speaker 1: when del Re emerges from its private equity position private
Speaker 1: company position, I think it will flourish again as a
Speaker 1: public company. So and I think Michael Stolen in the
Speaker 1: halftime here at at Michael's probably fifty, I think he's
Speaker 1: got a good thirty four year run to go here.
Speaker 1: MSD Ventures is capital Capital is someone in the neighble
Speaker 1: to twenty or thirty billion dollars the size of the
Speaker 1: Yale endowment. That's pretty substantial. I'm not sure they've done
Speaker 1: a masterful job that that place got started in and
Speaker 1: uh where I could be wrong. And so it's almost
Speaker 1: twenty years old, and they've done a masterful job of
Speaker 1: helping Michael with and his family with their investments, to
Speaker 1: say the least. So, so we talked a little bit
Speaker 1: about how you got into the financial services industry. Really
Speaker 1: you're just knocking on doors. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: could do that today. But you also talked about some
Speaker 1: early mentors. Who are the people that were early and
Speaker 1: influential in your career that that you remember fondly. Well.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's many of them are still very close
Speaker 1: friends of mine. Bob cash Rignano, who ran the Goldman
Speaker 1: Zax training program. UH. Bill Groover, who ran the training
Speaker 1: program before Bob, who's now a professor at Bucknell University. UH.
Speaker 1: I would tell you that Bob, Matsa and Jeff Lane
Speaker 1: are very close to me. Those are the guys that
Speaker 1: were from new Berger Berman that bought my company. Andrew
Speaker 1: KA Bosar Jr. Who was the co founder of Oscar Capital,
Speaker 1: but really the senior partner there. I was his junior partner.
Speaker 1: I would say without Andrew K. Bosar Jr. I don't
Speaker 1: think I would have had the courage Barry to leave
Speaker 1: Goldman Sachs when I did. I always dreamt about having
Speaker 1: my own business, but I think Andy provided me with
Speaker 1: the security and the financial stability. And I sort of
Speaker 1: knew that going into partnership with him, because he's such
Speaker 1: a naturally good person UH would lead to good things
Speaker 1: for me. UM and so I have to pay a
Speaker 1: huge tribute to him. UH. John Weinberg, the legendary John Weinberg,
Speaker 1: who I had the opportunity to be his private banker
Speaker 1: for a few years. He was the CEO of Goldman.
Speaker 1: He retired in I had some great aphorisms I'll remember
Speaker 1: the rest of my life. One was some people grow
Speaker 1: berry and other people swell, and you better figure out
Speaker 1: who you are, okay. And I think that was a
Speaker 1: very interesting thing about life and not getting too full
Speaker 1: of yourself. Uh. The other thing you to say is
Speaker 1: that trees do not grow to the sky. I've never
Speaker 1: seen a tree hit the moon. So be careful because
Speaker 1: markets are cyclical. Uh, markets get exuberant. He was a very,
Speaker 1: very wise, earthy guy. Uh. That really shaped the culture.
Speaker 1: Him and John Whitehead really shaped the culture of Goldman
Speaker 1: Sacks and really explained to people that you're gonna do
Speaker 1: a lot better if you can work on the team,
Speaker 1: figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are. Don't be insecure,
Speaker 1: don't try to go after the credit if you will,
Speaker 1: but pass the ball. And so I look at those
Speaker 1: people as great mentors of mine. I've probably left out ten.
Speaker 1: I don't want to make this like an Academy Awards speech.
Speaker 1: I probably left out ten other people. But what we
Speaker 1: know about life, you can't do it on your own.
Speaker 1: You gotta ask people for help. Ben Franklin once said
Speaker 1: several hundred years ago, if you want a friend, you
Speaker 1: gotta ask the person for a favor. And what typically
Speaker 1: happens is once you ignite that person's willingness to help you.
Speaker 1: And I'm in the camp that most people are good
Speaker 1: natured and they can go out of the way to
Speaker 1: help you, they will. Michael Milken, who I don't talk
Speaker 1: to every day, but I sort of feel like I
Speaker 1: can pick up the phone, God forbid, if there was
Speaker 1: a health issue in my family, Michael would be there.
Speaker 1: One of my partners at a prostate cancer scare, I
Speaker 1: picked up the phone and called Michael. He spent an
Speaker 1: hour on the phone with my my colleague. Uh. He's
Speaker 1: a great man. I've tried to be a charitable donator
Speaker 1: to his healthcare charities. He's a guy that if I
Speaker 1: had to make a big decision, I would call him
Speaker 1: and I would ask him for his advice. And so
Speaker 1: my message to our listeners is, if you want to
Speaker 1: make a friend, ask for the favor. Push the envelope
Speaker 1: a little bit. Let's talk about um, not just mentors.
Speaker 1: What investors influenced how you your career went on? Who
Speaker 1: who did you look at everybody says, well, Warren Buffett
Speaker 1: was really influential, But anybody that perhaps people may not
Speaker 1: know quite as well. Um, what investors did you find
Speaker 1: really influential and seminars, you know, the classic investors like Buffett,
Speaker 1: or Monger or Phil Fisher. I think everyone's gonna talk
Speaker 1: about those guys, Phil Fisher. Um. Phil, Phil Fisher is
Speaker 1: ken Fisher's dad, Ken Fisher's Fisher investments. But Phil was
Speaker 1: the real champion. And this is Charlie Munger's persuasion of
Speaker 1: Mr Buffett, who was buying cigar butts that were half smoked,
Speaker 1: and he was buying them at a discount, picking them
Speaker 1: up off the streets, so to speak. He convinced Mr
Speaker 1: Buffett to start buying growth orientated companies at fairer prices.
Speaker 1: And don't be super concerned about that huge value orientation.
Speaker 1: Make sure you're in a great business that as a
Speaker 1: moat around it that can excel. Uh and and and
Speaker 1: Warren Buffett and Phil Fischer and these guys were more
Speaker 1: focused on how companies perform and not necessarily how stocks trade.
Speaker 1: They're more focused on investing as opposed to day trading.
Speaker 1: And so those guys are a huge influenced to me. Um,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you something that may or may not
Speaker 1: surprise you. Uh. For my career, I'm more interested in
Speaker 1: the Steve jobs is. I'm more interested in the guys
Speaker 1: that the Richard Branson's or that the people I call
Speaker 1: the holy Trinity of disruption, which would be Ted Turner,
Speaker 1: Howard Schultz, and Richard Branson. Why am I so interested
Speaker 1: in those guys? This year? I do have Richard this year. Uh,
Speaker 1: they are breaking new ground. Uh. I'll tell you something.
Speaker 1: I'm in a commodity business fund of funds management years. Uh,
Speaker 1: several hundred of those sorts of things. Who else is
Speaker 1: in a commodity business. Well, there's a company that makes
Speaker 1: five products. They make a smartphone, a tablet. They used
Speaker 1: to make an MP three player, They have a hardtop
Speaker 1: and a laptop. Now they're gonna have a watch, Okay,
Speaker 1: And they still make the MP three players, just just
Speaker 1: no longer a hard drive. It well well, well yeah,
Speaker 1: well they've and they've also built it into the iPhone.
Speaker 1: But but Apple Computer, with those five commodity products, Barry
Speaker 1: and everybody in the world is making those products, particularly
Speaker 1: everybody in Asia. Apple Computer has turned itself into the
Speaker 1: largest market capitalized company because they understood how to take
Speaker 1: a commodity and turn it into an experience. You walk
Speaker 1: into their stores, you're on their their app store, you're
Speaker 1: in their eyebook store, you're on their iTunes store. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you're in their ecosystem. You feel hipper,
Speaker 1: you feel cooler. You're fifteen to eighteen year old daughter
Speaker 1: wants that phone versus the others. And they turned a
Speaker 1: commodity into an experience. Howard Schultz, he turned a commodity
Speaker 1: coffee that you and I went to the Landmark Diner
Speaker 1: room Manhasset and bought for twenty five cents in a
Speaker 1: Greek diner coffee cup. He turned that into an experience.
Speaker 1: I walk in there. Now it's got earth tones on
Speaker 1: the floor, there's a green apron. I'm speaking in their
Speaker 1: language about ordering something that I used to pay five
Speaker 1: cents for that I'm spending four dollars for. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: some good folk music in there, and I'm super happy
Speaker 1: about the whole thing. And so so what I look
Speaker 1: for these guys too. I'm gonna, by the way, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna combine the two. I take the Starbucks app. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and go exactly, and you got and I don't even
Speaker 1: reach into my pocket. You go to pay for this yourn.
Speaker 1: That's the funny thing is your phone is always out
Speaker 1: your while it's buried somewhere. Well, that's the other and
Speaker 1: that's Apple pay and and and so so from me,
Speaker 1: he was, no, exactly, that's Starbucks is card on there.
Speaker 1: But my my, my point is Richard Branson big commodity.
Speaker 1: Last fifty years air travel. Look at what he did
Speaker 1: to air travel, the colors to change. He turned those
Speaker 1: planes into an experience for the customer. We turned a
Speaker 1: coffee shop. Howard Schults turn a coffee shop into experience
Speaker 1: with the customer. Sky Bridge, we are trying to turn
Speaker 1: our investment thesis and our performance into an experience for
Speaker 1: the customer. We wanted to come to the Salt Conference
Speaker 1: and learn from some of the smartest people in the
Speaker 1: world what's going on in the world. We wanted to
Speaker 1: tune into our television show Wall Street week and get
Speaker 1: a thirty minute Salt conference every week. We want them
Speaker 1: to be investors of ours, and we want to help
Speaker 1: make them long term investors. You know you've heard this before,
Speaker 1: but maybe your your listeners haven't if you take the
Speaker 1: following two choices. Would you like ten thousand dollars a
Speaker 1: day or would you like a penny that I hand
Speaker 1: to you that doubles every day. So I'll give you
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars a day for thirty days, or I'll
Speaker 1: hand you a penny and it will double every day
Speaker 1: for thirty days. What do you want that? I got
Speaker 1: the math background, so I know I want that doubling penny. Yep.
Speaker 1: And so that doubling penny yields about five point four
Speaker 1: million dollars. If you're in your car, don't google it.
Speaker 1: But if you're at home, go to Google and look
Speaker 1: up a penny doubling every day for thirty days, and
Speaker 1: you'll see the spreadsheet come up. And what you'll find
Speaker 1: about life. If you can get people to think about
Speaker 1: their money going to work for them and compounding gradually
Speaker 1: in the marketplace, uh, it'll mean a more financially stable society,
Speaker 1: a more financially a stable and secure future for the individual.
Speaker 1: And this is something that I'm very passionate about. A skybridge.
Speaker 1: We're gonna try to make that broader and more open
Speaker 1: for the average person. So let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about your buddy Gary Kaminski, yea who I'm I know.
Speaker 1: He lives the next town over from me. You actually
Speaker 1: don't live that far from me either. I just moved
Speaker 1: a little east. So there must be there must be
Speaker 1: something in the water from Long Island and all its
Speaker 1: big males living in the same area Togain. It's it's
Speaker 1: not that far. We have a mutual friend, Jim McCann
Speaker 1: who was on the show that's great far from where
Speaker 1: you live as well. I'm a partner of his in
Speaker 1: the New York Mets, by the way. So he's a
Speaker 1: great human being. And Jim's son, Matthew, has worked at
Speaker 1: Skybridge for the last decade, one of the first employees
Speaker 1: that so we had him on the show. By the way,
Speaker 1: I talk about his new charity that he's he's wonderful,
Speaker 1: and he's like, you know, we're really not ready to
Speaker 1: talk about that yet. Jim, I wanted you to. Let's
Speaker 1: raise you a little money. It's like later, okay, it's
Speaker 1: it's uh And it's actually a wonderful local charity. Wonderful guy.
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to seeing what that goes. But let's
Speaker 1: talk about Kaminsky. He would go in that mentor role
Speaker 1: model camp too. By the way that no, I mean
Speaker 1: Jim Gary. Gary's a contemporary. He's a very close personal friend.
Speaker 1: Before I left to launch my firm. Yeah, I had
Speaker 1: dinner with Jim and and said, here's what I'm thinking about.
Speaker 1: There's a few people like that in my life. Another
Speaker 1: guy is Ed Mandel David Sure and basically said here's
Speaker 1: what I'm thinking about. And each of them, from a
Speaker 1: very different philosophical approach, gave me very good advice, very
Speaker 1: complimentary advice, but from a different angle. And and McCann
Speaker 1: is one of the how do you describe him? He's
Speaker 1: just very easy going and very insightful, and he's got,
Speaker 1: like you and I do, a pretty thick New York
Speaker 1: Long Island accent, and he sort of surprises you because
Speaker 1: what comes out of out from that accent is a
Speaker 1: little different than I think a lot of people expect.
Speaker 1: He's a he's a wonderful human being. And he took something, uh,
Speaker 1: and this is what I love about life, and great
Speaker 1: American entrepreneurs can take nothing and turned it into something. Literally,
Speaker 1: he took a queen's flower shop and turned it into
Speaker 1: an internationally recognized iconic brand. And so when I sat
Speaker 1: down with him uh m and acid had dinner with
Speaker 1: him when I was starting Skybridge. Uh he gave me
Speaker 1: a lot of good advice and he said, hey, my
Speaker 1: son will come in an intern for you. And this
Speaker 1: is a great story. The kid worked for me for
Speaker 1: three months, fell in love with him, and I offered
Speaker 1: him a permanent job. The thing is, I couldn't offer
Speaker 1: him the permanent job until I was confident that we
Speaker 1: were raising the capital. But once we got the capital
Speaker 1: in place, I turned him out and said, hey, we
Speaker 1: got to offer your permanent job. He's there for ten years.
Speaker 1: And so I not only oh Jim some of the
Speaker 1: benefit of his great advice, but he also put his
Speaker 1: first second born son in my office. So I'm very
Speaker 1: grateful for that too. So let's talk about Kaminski. So, so,
Speaker 1: Gary is a dear friend. We've known each other forever.
Speaker 1: Gary has a wonderful way on television. He's very quick
Speaker 1: on his feet about particulate, very fast. Uh He's got
Speaker 1: a real expertise behind. Like I don't know if you
Speaker 1: look at the same way when I watch other people
Speaker 1: on TV and look, you and I have been doing
Speaker 1: CNBC and Fox and Bloomberg for for decades, I watched
Speaker 1: somebody on TV and ten seconds it's like this guy
Speaker 1: doesn't know what he's talking about, or this guy is
Speaker 1: trying to be outrageous to make a call, or like
Speaker 1: you and I, I assume are kind of critical. And
Speaker 1: when you see somebody like Kaminsky on TV right away
Speaker 1: you say, oh, this is a real depth and knowledge.
Speaker 1: Back here to remember. So he's a money man. I
Speaker 1: mean he was running billions and billions of dollars at
Speaker 1: New Berger Berman. Uh, he's one of the best money
Speaker 1: managers of our generations. That it was a Darmoul brad
Speaker 1: m d brilliant guy. Still working at New Burger with
Speaker 1: his other brother Michael. They have a great team there.
Speaker 1: Full disclosure. They manage some of my retirement money and
Speaker 1: my family trust. I have an enormous respect for the
Speaker 1: Kaminski family as investors. But here's something that Gary has
Speaker 1: been absolutely brilliant about. And you and I a decade,
Speaker 1: but Gary has been on Tellers for twenty five years. Amazing.
Speaker 1: His first time on TV, I think he was well, yeah,
Speaker 1: well yeah, let's let's let's put him back. I call
Speaker 1: him Grandpa Gary. Now, just to tease him. But but
Speaker 1: but he's Uh, he's been a great friend. But he's
Speaker 1: an insightful guy. Here's the thing I find that we
Speaker 1: have to be careful of as pundits. We don't want
Speaker 1: to just provide information to people. We want to provide
Speaker 1: them insight and what context with them exactly context, what
Speaker 1: to do with the information. There's nobody better on television
Speaker 1: than Gary Kaimisky and doing that. And I'll tell you
Speaker 1: another thing about Gary Kaminski. Uh, the guests want to
Speaker 1: be on the show, Uh, in large part because of him. Well,
Speaker 1: let me put it to you this way. I think
Speaker 1: he knows these guys a lot better than me. A
Speaker 1: lot of these people you know. And I have some
Speaker 1: close friends in the hedge fund community and some close
Speaker 1: friends as a result of Salt but being on television
Speaker 1: twenty five years and interviewing different money managers over that
Speaker 1: span of time. He had his own television show about
Speaker 1: five years ago. Uh. He has a whole code array,
Speaker 1: a whole broad deep rolodex of people that I think
Speaker 1: are fascinating that I'm looking forward to having the opportunity
Speaker 1: to interview on our show. At the time of Gary Show,
Speaker 1: which was the name of it was Strategy Session, right.
Speaker 1: I thought it was the best show on the CNBC lineup,
Speaker 1: but they had put it at the wrong time. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a lunch hour show. It was either a seven
Speaker 1: am show or a four pm After the Bell show.
Speaker 1: But in the middle of the day it didn't find
Speaker 1: its audience. And it was very smart and very well done.
Speaker 1: Well listen. I mean, there's a lot of different things
Speaker 1: that go on in these places in terms of how
Speaker 1: you make decisions about leaving a show on the air
Speaker 1: or not. And so one of the things that Gary
Speaker 1: and I Skybridge what we thought we would do is
Speaker 1: we would make the show ourselves. This way, we could
Speaker 1: show the show whenever we wanted. You can go to
Speaker 1: Wall Street week dot com and watch it. We are
Speaker 1: televising it on Fox affiliates because I am a contributor
Speaker 1: to Fox Business and Fox News. But now that's something new,
Speaker 1: because you weren't always a contributor. No, no, I had.
Speaker 1: I had a prior relationship with CNBC, and that was
Speaker 1: for a couple of a good couple of years, a
Speaker 1: couple of years, but they were a spot. Now I know.
Speaker 1: Bloomberg is a sponsor of the conference wasn't CNBC at
Speaker 1: one time CNBC. Well, you know, I think there's a
Speaker 1: couple of guys coming from the internet side, but I
Speaker 1: think the the television side this year will be Fox
Speaker 1: Business in Bloomberg and listen. You know, the truth of
Speaker 1: the matter is, um, I have fallen in love with
Speaker 1: Roger Ales and Bill Shine. Roger has done and we
Speaker 1: wanna talk about an entrepreneur, I gotta put him up
Speaker 1: there with the other ones we were referencing. Fox is
Speaker 1: a giant. But you just think about what Roger Ayles did.
Speaker 1: He started something from absolutely nothing, um. And he'll tell
Speaker 1: you himself that people were throwing eggs and tomatoes at
Speaker 1: him and Rupert Murdoch scoffing at the idea that they
Speaker 1: were going to take on CNN. Can I tell you
Speaker 1: look at look at what he's done. He's one of
Speaker 1: my intellectual heroes. I don't agree with the politics of
Speaker 1: of some of the crazy that we run into on
Speaker 1: some of the more radical shows on Box, but when
Speaker 1: you look at it strictly from a business perspective, they
Speaker 1: may be the most successful cable television channel ever. Well, listen,
Speaker 1: I I think that there are crazies on the left.
Speaker 1: There are crazies on the right, and I know, but
Speaker 1: MSNBC has no influence. Foxes enormously. People scoff at the
Speaker 1: tagline fair and balance, but I always tell people who
Speaker 1: aren't watching it, go watch it because it is fair
Speaker 1: and balance. They are bringing a ton of Democrats on
Speaker 1: the show. They are bringing a ton of left leaning people.
Speaker 1: I would argue with the fair and balance but from
Speaker 1: but there's no But there's no argument from a business perspective.
Speaker 1: They are the most one of the if not the
Speaker 1: most successful. Watch Bill O'Reilly's show for one week and
Speaker 1: you tell me where he's not fair and balance? So
Speaker 1: what's pretty fair? Independent guys? So let me tell you
Speaker 1: this is an interesting digression. But Bill O'Reilly when he
Speaker 1: first started, was kind of described as the wild man
Speaker 1: of Fox. And now how Bill O'Reilly is essentially the
Speaker 1: adult supervision. He is the closest thing to fair and
Speaker 1: balanced on Fox. When you compare him, he's practically statesmanlike
Speaker 1: against some of the other I'm not going to mention
Speaker 1: people by name, but some of the more extreme shows,
Speaker 1: and you know, every now and then there's some really listen,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a I'm a declared Republican and so I
Speaker 1: but that's a transition for you as well. Well. No,
Speaker 1: I've always been a Republican, but my law school classmate
Speaker 1: was a couple of years behind me. Barack Obama when
Speaker 1: he ran for the presidency two years behind you, was
Speaker 1: that right, two years behind me? I did support him
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, and so, as a good
Speaker 1: Roman Catholic, I'm paying penance now to the to the
Speaker 1: Republican Party for doing that. But but so you know, listen,
Speaker 1: I don't want to spend the whole time talking about Fox.
Speaker 1: I'm in love with the network. Uh. I think they
Speaker 1: do a massiful job. I think that Brett Bear Special
Speaker 1: Report is among the best news uh that can be
Speaker 1: delivered out there. Show me a better news program. I
Speaker 1: do think that they are fair and balanced. Not to
Speaker 1: say that they don't have right leaning shows, but they
Speaker 1: have a lot of left leaning individuals on there. And
Speaker 1: I think that the reason why people are watching them
Speaker 1: and Quinnipiac backs is up they were entertaining. Well. No,
Speaker 1: they voted in the most trusted news organization in the
Speaker 1: United States when they had a pole So we don't
Speaker 1: we we don't have to you and I disagree possibly
Speaker 1: about some of this stuff, so that I like them.
Speaker 1: So let's tall. I have an enormous amount of respect
Speaker 1: for Roger rails Well and Bill Shine for that man.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about your involvement with
Speaker 1: Barack Obama, because there's a wonderful arc when people talk
Speaker 1: about who is Anthony Scaramucci? So you support your former
Speaker 1: Harvard Look classmate he gets elected. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: we're in the midst of a financial crisis. Lo and behold,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of chess beating about Wall Street. Um.
Speaker 1: I try to be as objective as possible in bail
Speaker 1: Out Nation because I didn't want to write the book
Speaker 1: that there's a story to that. Bill Fleckenstein's Greenspan's Bubble
Speaker 1: had come out and it was wildly successful for a
Speaker 1: business book, and uh mcgroy hill had gone to him
Speaker 1: and said, okay, now let's do something on bear Sterns.
Speaker 1: And he goes, hey, man, I just finished one book
Speaker 1: and I need a few years to you know what
Speaker 1: it's You've written super hard. You know, it takes a
Speaker 1: year or two to recover. So they asked him, who
Speaker 1: who else is writing on this? Oh? That's easy. Ridholtz
Speaker 1: has been running about Baron Lehman for a year or two.
Speaker 1: You should go talk to him, And I said, no,
Speaker 1: no exaggeration, half half a dozen times. I don't want this.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I tried to be objective, which is a
Speaker 1: real challenge. But the reason I bring that up within
Speaker 1: the context is there was a lot of beating on
Speaker 1: Wall Street. And look, you and I have both been
Speaker 1: in this industry for twenty plus year. You know that
Speaker 1: there's a handful of people in every firm that blows
Speaker 1: up that a response. My favorite example is a I
Speaker 1: G was seventy employees, two people in the financial products division,
Speaker 1: and of those two people, a dozen were responsible for
Speaker 1: all of the damage. So when people are beating on
Speaker 1: Wall Street, they're beating on the headlines, or they're beating
Speaker 1: on a guy like Dick Fold, but the people at
Speaker 1: Lehman Brothers didn't cause it to blow up. One of
Speaker 1: which leads me to the line, Hey, Barack, you're beating
Speaker 1: us like a pinata. That's that's where I wanted to
Speaker 1: go with That was a that was a tough line
Speaker 1: for me. So I was at the museum at a
Speaker 1: town hall meeting, Susan Krakaur, who is now my producer
Speaker 1: for formerly producer at CNBC and a big demand money
Speaker 1: and Fast money, long television background. Uh, she's our producer
Speaker 1: for Wall Street Week and a partner of mine. She
Speaker 1: basically called on me to ask a question of the president.
Speaker 1: He recognized me immediately from law school. We got a
Speaker 1: little of a bantam while I also supported him, and
Speaker 1: I said, well, Mr President, when are we going to
Speaker 1: stop whacking Wall Street with a pinata stick? Well, one
Speaker 1: thing you learned is as an Italian American, you shouldn't
Speaker 1: use the word whack on live television. That's one thing
Speaker 1: you learned. And you know the president as a bully pulpit,
Speaker 1: and so he bullied me with the pulpit, and so
Speaker 1: that was fine, But that wasn't the reason why I
Speaker 1: switched back to the Republican. But let's talk about one
Speaker 1: second and then we'll come back to the Republicans and
Speaker 1: I will have a discussion because I'm an ex Republican.
Speaker 1: But you um that when viral that line blew up,
Speaker 1: It was on The Daily Show, was on Fox, it
Speaker 1: was on CNN, that basically was everywhere. What was that like? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, let me tell you something. I was lit
Speaker 1: up by the left wing blogs and YouTube. That clip
Speaker 1: was on YouTube YouTube a few million views. You know.
Speaker 1: Jon Stewart had some funny lines about me that my
Speaker 1: teenage children still give back to me over the last
Speaker 1: four or five years. But what I would say to
Speaker 1: you about that experience is uh, something that you should
Speaker 1: never read with people write about you. That's probably a
Speaker 1: good idea, but don't. But I did read a comment
Speaker 1: where somebody said to me that I was an elitist
Speaker 1: because I was. I didn't realize that Wall Street was
Speaker 1: this great sinning society and Barack Obama was the popular savior,
Speaker 1: and I was an elitist because I was a member
Speaker 1: of the Wall Street community, like it's a monolithic exactly.
Speaker 1: And I remember thinking to myself, my god, this person
Speaker 1: thinks I'm gonna leaders. I grew up in a middle
Speaker 1: class family on Long Island in Port Washington. My parents
Speaker 1: didn't go to college. How am I an elitist? And
Speaker 1: then it dawned on me, Barry, that the person that
Speaker 1: wrote that was right, that I had actually become an
Speaker 1: elitist because I was insulating myself with super wealthy people
Speaker 1: managing the money of super wealthy people going to fancy
Speaker 1: pants country clubs and fancy pants restaurants, and I was
Speaker 1: losing touch with some of the things that the middle
Speaker 1: class of the United States and the lower middle class
Speaker 1: are suffering with. And so that whole experience for me
Speaker 1: was hugely valuable because when I worked for Governor Romney
Speaker 1: on the two thousand twelve election, I asked for the
Speaker 1: opportunity to travel and got an opportunity to see some
Speaker 1: of the small towns in the United States that are
Speaker 1: frankly suffering. We've got a wage depression or stagnation. We
Speaker 1: have a disposable income decline over the least six or
Speaker 1: seven years. And you know it goes back decades, but
Speaker 1: the last six or seven years I had an eight
Speaker 1: percent drop. That's fairly steep. And so the point of
Speaker 1: me bringing all this up is that we have to
Speaker 1: come up. But this is not a left or right discussion.
Speaker 1: This is a right or wrong discussion. Or as Scott
Speaker 1: Walker said in a dinner on Sunday night, it's not
Speaker 1: a red or blue thing. It's a red, white and
Speaker 1: blue thing. And the point being is that we have
Speaker 1: to come up with the right policy directives. The right initiatives, corporations,
Speaker 1: small businesses. We have to figure out a way to
Speaker 1: close that income gap. We have to figure out a
Speaker 1: way to grow the po. I I'm not a big
Speaker 1: believer in the redistribution theory. I don't think that's ever
Speaker 1: worked in history. We have a lot of laboratory documentation
Speaker 1: about that not working. Uh, And so we have to
Speaker 1: figure out a way to empower people. And this is
Speaker 1: another reason not to threat it back to our show
Speaker 1: Wall Street Week, but one of the themes and the
Speaker 1: mission statements of the Wall Street Week is, hey, rely
Speaker 1: on yourself. You can't rely on Social Security, you can't
Speaker 1: be a dependent of the government. We gotta figure out
Speaker 1: ways to help you save and build an est eg
Speaker 1: for yourselves. So that's really a fascinating tell. I love
Speaker 1: that arc. And you, basically, I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: aware of what you just said, but one of your
Speaker 1: early mentors who had said to you, are you gonna
Speaker 1: grow or you're gonna swell? You're basically saying that pre Pinata,
Speaker 1: you were engaging in a little swelling. Is that what
Speaker 1: I'm hearing from? Well, I, you know, I certainly didn't
Speaker 1: think I was engaging in swelling. But I possibly was
Speaker 1: not only just engaging in swelling, is I was overly
Speaker 1: insulating myself in a way where you're losing touch with
Speaker 1: the some of the things that you need to really
Speaker 1: focus on in your life. And so and in politics
Speaker 1: that's huge, and in politics, but also in business. UM,
Speaker 1: I've really tried to set up Skybridge in a way
Speaker 1: where who's ever working at Skybridge they feel like they're
Speaker 1: getting a good experience. We pay a percent of the
Speaker 1: health care at Skybridge. We give the most allowable or
Speaker 1: the maximum profit contribution to the i RA S or matching. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm Italian. We serve a free meal every
Speaker 1: day at lunch. If you're there for dinner, we're gonna
Speaker 1: serve your dinner. My My whole feeling is is that
Speaker 1: I feel that we can create a profitable enough firm
Speaker 1: to help people with their retirement and help people with
Speaker 1: their current healthcare and so so I really have tried
Speaker 1: to think about these things in the most human way possible,
Speaker 1: because at the end of the day, UM, I think
Speaker 1: that's all we really have is the relationships that we
Speaker 1: have with the other people around us. And so so
Speaker 1: sometimes if you are in a tunnel, or sometimes you're
Speaker 1: overly focused on certain things, you can lose focus on
Speaker 1: important things. I if I gave you all my flaws,
Speaker 1: we'd be here for six days. And there's a ton
Speaker 1: and there's a big phone book of them. But but
Speaker 1: one thing that the pinata experience did for me, it
Speaker 1: was very eye opening about not overly insulating yourself. So
Speaker 1: so let me ask you a couple of related questions.
Speaker 1: And I only have you for another fifteen minutes or
Speaker 1: so before your um colleague is gonna start bouncing off
Speaker 1: the glass walls in the UH in the engineers booth um.
Speaker 1: Is Wall Street still being treated like a pinata? Or
Speaker 1: have we begun to move past that? Well, I think
Speaker 1: there's a number of things that have happened, and and
Speaker 1: not to music cliche, at one or two bad Apple
Speaker 1: spoils a whole bunch. But what has basically happened is
Speaker 1: the media focuses on Wall Street. It's a lot like
Speaker 1: what Willie Sutton said about banks, because that's amount of
Speaker 1: money is and so when the media is focusing, the
Speaker 1: focus has been on sort of three things. The person
Speaker 1: that's made a billion, the person that lost a billion,
Speaker 1: and the person that stole a billion, and so it's
Speaker 1: made a billion, lost a billion, stole a billion, and
Speaker 1: the and the stole a billion one is the most
Speaker 1: riveting because that's the car crash where all the rubber
Speaker 1: necking takes place. And so what that does is it
Speaker 1: infuses the spirit of distrust, malfeasance, malpractice. Uh. And to
Speaker 1: your earlier point, there were probably pick the number. Most
Speaker 1: of the people in our community are really trying to
Speaker 1: do a good job, and most of the people really
Speaker 1: care about their customers and are not in the rip
Speaker 1: off business. And so uh that and are offended by
Speaker 1: the concept of, Hey, if you have a product to
Speaker 1: go sell, go sell it. But if you're gonna steal
Speaker 1: from people, what is that job? You know? That seems
Speaker 1: to be the two. If you worked inside the sky bridge,
Speaker 1: you'd have to hear this lecture all time. You know,
Speaker 1: my my parents and my grandparents, Uh, they love me
Speaker 1: very much much. Uh. Many of them work with their hands.
Speaker 1: Many many of these people were never educated. And I
Speaker 1: always tell the people that work inside a skybridge, but
Speaker 1: one thing they did for me is give me my
Speaker 1: last name clean. There's not enough art, there's not enough,
Speaker 1: not a big enough house there isn't a large enough
Speaker 1: private plane that I need to do anything to hurt
Speaker 1: my family or my mom and dad. And so I
Speaker 1: really try to drive that home because I think, uh,
Speaker 1: in leadership, the fish things from the head down. I
Speaker 1: try to let my staff know we don't ever need
Speaker 1: to go anywhere near any line. Our job is to
Speaker 1: serve our customers. And I also tell the staff. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you some there are six d people relying
Speaker 1: on the firm. Immediately, those are the sixty people inside
Speaker 1: the firm. And then there's all the dependence that would
Speaker 1: be my four children, my mom and dad who I subsidize. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, my my employees and staff are partners. All
Speaker 1: have children. They need to make mortgage payments, they need
Speaker 1: to make tuition payments. We got a ton of people
Speaker 1: relying on us, and so don't just think about your
Speaker 1: self when you're making decisions. Think about that broad community
Speaker 1: of people. Uh that or want you to look out
Speaker 1: for them? All right, So in the last couple of
Speaker 1: minutes we have, let me get to my last few
Speaker 1: questions or a couple of questions I always ask, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to skip um. But first a quick
Speaker 1: hedge fund question so the rules have recently been changed
Speaker 1: on on advertising, on marketing. How is that changing the
Speaker 1: hedge fund world. Well, I think for right now it's
Speaker 1: not changing the hedge fund world because most people have
Speaker 1: elected to stay away from it because they're getting advice
Speaker 1: from their outside councils and their internal council that the
Speaker 1: rules are very uncertain and you don't want to hit
Speaker 1: a trip wire somewhere where you get the the SEC
Speaker 1: or some other regulatory agency upset with you. Um and
Speaker 1: so I think it's hard. One thing that Skybridge did
Speaker 1: which I don't view as necessarily advertising, is we went
Speaker 1: into a public private partnership with the City of West
Speaker 1: Palm Beach uh and we are the sponsors for their
Speaker 1: bicycles share a Ride program, so like like city Bikes
Speaker 1: Nike here and so we've got a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: bikes bicycles at fourteen kiosks throughout the city of West
Speaker 1: Palm Beach. We just opened an office in Palm Beach.
Speaker 1: Guard pretty clean. That's this, this environmentally safe. All it
Speaker 1: is is our logo. I can't believe any compliance lawyer
Speaker 1: would give anybody no no, no. The outside compliance people,
Speaker 1: the inside compliance people, all thought that that was okay.
Speaker 1: Some people call that advertising. I'm calling it branding, calling
Speaker 1: a brand awareness. I want people to say, hey, this
Speaker 1: seems like a pretty cool group of people. Let me
Speaker 1: look at their website or let me check out where
Speaker 1: they're doing uh, and then they can make draw their
Speaker 1: own conclusions about our performance UH and the quality of
Speaker 1: the stuff that we're doing inside the So let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about hedge funds briefly. There's been a lot of
Speaker 1: criticism by some people in this room um that the
Speaker 1: performance for the whole community of edge funds has been
Speaker 1: soft and the fees have been hard high. Obviously that
Speaker 1: doesn't apply to everybody, but by and large, the hedge
Speaker 1: fund and by the way, hedge funds continue to attract
Speaker 1: lots and lots of capital. What what is the story
Speaker 1: of of hedge fund investing today? It really depends on
Speaker 1: what you're looking for. If you're looking for a panacea
Speaker 1: or the perfect investment story, it's not out there, and
Speaker 1: someone that's trying to tell you that it is, well,
Speaker 1: chances so they'll be in jail before long. And So
Speaker 1: I look at the hedge fund community as a group
Speaker 1: of people are super sophisticated that have a great diversity
Speaker 1: of skills. They can go along something in short, something
Speaker 1: which means by and bet for something, or sell and
Speaker 1: bet against something. They have an ambidexteriative talent. UH. And
Speaker 1: the goal, at least the Skybridge goal is to try
Speaker 1: to get a high single digit return with one third
Speaker 1: of the volatility of the SMP. I'm not allowed to
Speaker 1: talk about my performance on a radio show, but people
Speaker 1: can go to our website and figure it out. Uhclosure
Speaker 1: and that sort of stuff. But we but we I
Speaker 1: will simply tell you that I believe in the industry.
Speaker 1: I'll say tell you that we went from one billion
Speaker 1: to nine point three billion dollars in discretionary assets in
Speaker 1: five years because we are doing a service to people
Speaker 1: who want a stable return with less volatility. If they're
Speaker 1: looking for us to outperform the market, it is not
Speaker 1: our product. I would not recommend it. If they're looking
Speaker 1: for us to do something that we cannot do, I
Speaker 1: certainly try to tell them that I would not recommend it.
Speaker 1: But there's been softness in the broader industry because of
Speaker 1: the macroeconomic policy driven by the Federal Reserve. The low
Speaker 1: interest rates have crushed the long short manager, and so
Speaker 1: for your listeners, that's the manager that's taking bets on
Speaker 1: the long side and taking bets against companies. What's happened
Speaker 1: is because of the liquidity, those markets are rising, and
Speaker 1: so the shorts are going up on those managers, and
Speaker 1: they have mediocre performance. They make up of the industry barry,
Speaker 1: and so so when the monetary policy starts to normalize,
Speaker 1: I predicted that group of people will do better. But
Speaker 1: those are really the people that the stories are being
Speaker 1: written about. We we we are a different group, You're
Speaker 1: a different target. We have very low exposure along short
Speaker 1: managers right now because of the Federal Reserve monetary policy.
Speaker 1: We're more exposed to structure credit, more exposed to event
Speaker 1: driven activism and things like that, both of which I
Speaker 1: think are well situated for the current economic climate that
Speaker 1: we're in. But I'll tell you right now, macro managers
Speaker 1: and long short managers. If you add the fort which
Speaker 1: is long short plus the fifteen which is macro, roughly
Speaker 1: two thirds or six of our industry is woefully underperforming
Speaker 1: due to current Federal Reserve monetary policy. So I expect
Speaker 1: more negative articles to be written about the industry, but
Speaker 1: it's not telling the whole story. So before I get
Speaker 1: to my last two questions, I'm gonna give you this
Speaker 1: will be the speed round. A few quick questions. Who's um,
Speaker 1: it's pretty clear the Democrats in the nominate Hillary. Who's
Speaker 1: gonna come out of the Republican primary process? Well, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm working super hard for Scott Walker and full disclosure.
Speaker 1: And so I'm so you're raising money. We've had several
Speaker 1: events from this week in New York. We did an
Speaker 1: event from in Naples, Florida. We've done many events in
Speaker 1: my office already. Uh. Scott has become a dear friend. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I tell you that I think he would be
Speaker 1: an incredible president and he would be the guy that
Speaker 1: I would hire to do the job of fixing many
Speaker 1: of our problems. What what about the heat coming off
Speaker 1: of Rubio right after the big GOP. Don't dislike him.
Speaker 1: I think he's very talented. He's a very articulate, very charismatic,
Speaker 1: great public speaker. I think he's woll versed on a
Speaker 1: lot of the farm I don't have I I've adapted. Uh.
Speaker 1: The eleventh commandment of Ronald Reagan is that shall not
Speaker 1: say a negative thing about a fellow Republican and so
Speaker 1: so for me, I like Senator Rubio. Uh. And I'll
Speaker 1: make a prediction here on your show. Hopefully you'll invite
Speaker 1: me back. If Governor Walker gets the nomination, I expect
Speaker 1: Marco Rubio to be as vice president. Really, that's that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: So last two questions I asked these of all my guests,
Speaker 1: and they always engender a really interesting uh set of answers.
Speaker 1: You know you've been in this business quarter century, coming
Speaker 1: on starting your second quarter century. You know, what do
Speaker 1: you see as the next major shift in the financial
Speaker 1: services industry. I think that the there will be a
Speaker 1: there'll be a further electronic shift. I think advice is
Speaker 1: going to be coming over the smartphone. Advice is going
Speaker 1: to be coming over the LinkedIn like in Facebook, like apps. Um.
Speaker 1: I think the generation that you and I made, which
Speaker 1: is our sons and daughters, are more comfortable with the
Speaker 1: computer interface, less comfortable with the written word in the
Speaker 1: magazine or a newspaper. And so I think that there
Speaker 1: will be more efficiencies created in the advice giving side
Speaker 1: of financial services, no question about that. And and here's
Speaker 1: my favorite question. I get to ask, and you're really
Speaker 1: a perfect got to ask this. What do you know
Speaker 1: today about investing, about the market, about this industry that
Speaker 1: you wish you knew when you started? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I was investing in biotechnology call options when I started,
Speaker 1: because you see, Barry, I was a guru in biotechnology,
Speaker 1: even though I didn't have any scientific background, and so
Speaker 1: I was absolutely certain that certain drugs we're gonna get
Speaker 1: through their Phase three trials and so forth. And I
Speaker 1: lost about fifty or sixty thousand dollars of money that
Speaker 1: I didn't need to lose at that time or want to.
Speaker 1: And so I really wish I could have told my
Speaker 1: younger self, uh to stick with that simple computational table
Speaker 1: known as compound interest. Shoot for a seven eight nine
Speaker 1: percent return. The turtle wins the race to five years. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: when you're our age, you know, they go by very quickly.
Speaker 1: When you're young, they think you're they're forever away. But
Speaker 1: if you just stick to a very steady, healthy, low
Speaker 1: leveraged investment discipline, you will get yourself and your family
Speaker 1: to the promised land. I wish I had known that
Speaker 1: back then. My first ten years on Wall Street, I
Speaker 1: spent trying to be the smartest person in the crowd,
Speaker 1: doing the stupendous thing, finding the long shot that was
Speaker 1: gonna make me a hero on a golf course where
Speaker 1: I get bragged to somebody that I always tend to
Speaker 1: want on something when I was Oh, for a hundred,
Speaker 1: if you will, And so I would tell people and
Speaker 1: my younger self be patient. The turtle wins the race.
Speaker 1: The truisms of a Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger, Uh,
Speaker 1: they exist today, they existed fifty years ago, they'll exist
Speaker 1: fifty years from now. Uh. And you're not smarter than
Speaker 1: your grandparents. You're not smarter than your parents. You may
Speaker 1: be more technologically adept, but follow those well steeped principles.
Speaker 1: We've been speaking with Anthony Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital, host
Speaker 1: of the Salt Conference and Wall Street Week. My name
Speaker 1: is Barry Rihults. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure
Speaker 1: and look up an Inch ro Down an Inch on
Speaker 1: Apple iTunes. You can see the other forty such conversations
Speaker 1: we've had over the past year. Check out my daily
Speaker 1: column on Bloomberg View dot com or my Twitter feed
Speaker 1: at Ridhults. You can find Anthony Scaramucci on Twitter at Scaramucci,
Speaker 1: or at Wall Street week dot com or Skybridge Capital
Speaker 1: a Scaramucci, Skybridge Capitol dot com or prosper at Wall
Speaker 1: Street dot com. I'm Barry Rihults. You've been listening to
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio