Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Have You Been in the Room Where it Happens? With George Stephanopoulos

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

This week, Anthony talks with veteran political news host and former advisor to President Clinton, George Stephanopoulos. George’s new book The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, describes the room that defines American power. From the moment President’s Kennedy and Reagan were shot, to the harrowing hours of 9/11 and the raid on Osama Bin Laden. Gives his insiders perspective and recounts the crises that decided the course of history… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the

parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punch it, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. The Situation Room, an infamous place in presidential history. Twelve administrations have used it and each president's attitude towards it has reflected their personality. That's what my guest, George Stephanopoulos, notes in his brand new book. We've all seen it in the movies, but what's it really like and what crucial decisions have really been made within those walls? George is here to tell us. Joining us now on open book is George Stephanopoulos. He's the host of ABCs this week with George Stepanopoulos. He's also the co-anchor of Good Morning America. But so many other things, George, the first time I met you,

and you're not going to remember this because you were famous at the time. I was not. A gentleman by the name of Ram Emanuel introduced me to you in the Roosevelt room. And this is maybe the first or second month of the Clinton administration. And so I'll tell you what happened to me. my roommate, I don't know if you would remember Rick Lerner or Jen Scully, but my roommate worked for a guy named Kenneth Brody. Yeah, he was one of President Clinton's earliest supporters in the campaign. Exactly. And so he worked for Ken Brody, who unfortunately is now deceased, but he took me on tour in the White House. He was working for Rahm Emanuel at the time. You walked in, looking exactly the way you do now, except with a little bit of gray hair, and you introduced yourself.

And of course, that was the first time I met you. And then unfortunately for me, after I got fired, you were my first interview. I remember that. But you were very nice to me, which I'll always be grateful for. And you are the author of this very, very terrific, insightful insider's view of things. The title of the book is The Situation Room, The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis. You know, when I'm reading the book, I'm thinking of people like McGeorge Bundy. You know, I'm thinking of Bobby Kennedy.

in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 13 days. I'm thinking of... The situation room back in 61. That's when it was first set up right after the Bay of Pigs. Yep. I'm thinking of Graham Allison, who wrote Essence of Decision. Okay, so you're in the genre of this is why the American people, among many other reasons, have the American presidency.

A crisis comes, the president of those three branches of government. The president is the one that is perhaps the most flexible, that can move the most quickly. And of course, he or she, it'll eventually be a she, is the commander in chief and has to make Johnny on the spot decisions in the situation room. So I've been in the situation room. You've been in the situation room. Before we get into the book, tell us a little bit about the situation room.

And what should the American people know about it that, of course, isn't classified? Well, it's an incredible spot. You've been there. You know, it's in the basement of the White House. For the longest time, it was the most. nondescript room in the world. I mean, it was, as I said, it was set up right after the Bay of Pigs by John F. Kennedy because he was pissed off after the Bay of Pigs.

He felt misled by the CIA. He felt misled by the generals. And he wanted to have his own information stream coming in to the government. It's kind of amazing that there had never been a situation room in the White House before that. I mean, you'd had Roosevelt had the map room during World War II. Of course, Lincoln famously went down to the telegraph office during the Civil War. But there had never been a permanent situation room in the White House until John F. Kennedy set it up in 1961. You know, it was actually there's a fascinating side story on that.

The guy who first mentioned the idea of a situation room to Kennedy was a man named Godfrey McHugh, who was just a larger-than-life character, French-speaking, French-accented, American Air Force General, who had the most amazing life. He had lunch with Churchill and Roosevelt at the White House when he was basically a teenager. He dated Jackie Kennedy before he dated John F. Kennedy, and he became Kennedy's closest military age. He's the one that sent him the paper saying, we need a situation and we'd deal with the Cold War. Kennedy did not act on it at first, but he did act on it after the Bay of Pigs. They built it in like two weeks. Ironically, and you know, you mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis up at the start.

Ironically, once it was built, Kennedy didn't go there all that much. He actually ran the Cuban Missile Crisis mostly from the Cabinet Room. He took the information from the Situation Room, but he didn't go there that much because for most of its history, up until really this year, the Situation Room was just this tiny, windowless conference room that looked like a Poconos conference room in the basement of the White House. And Kennedy even at one point said it was a pig pen. So he didn't go in there that much, but he did draw on the information that was being gleaned by all the professionals who serve in that room. Well, I mean, it is a lasting legacy of that administration, right? Because we're talking 60 plus years later, and I think it's become more important. And of course, President Biden,

it was scheduled. So whether, no matter who won the presidency in 2000, 20, it was scheduled for refurbishment, and it got a refurbishment. You've got a multi-million dollar refurbishment. Have you been in it since it's been refurbished? It's incredible, you know. When I was interviewing people for this book, I interviewed over 100 people. My first question in the interview, just to break the ice, was always, do you remember your first time in the situation room?

I actually didn't. I couldn't remember the pinpoint my first exact day. And a lot of people didn't either in part because it was so unremarkable. But my impression when I walked in last August, which was just as the renovation was being done, is, wow, it finally looks like it's supposed to look in the movies. It finally looks like it's coming out of 24 Dr. Strangelove. It is super high tech right now. It's actually now a series of conference rooms, including the famous Kennedy conference rooms,

a watch center where the professionals who keep an eye on all the information streams coming into the government is manned 24-7. It's kind of got stadium-style seating. The director sits behind them behind a glass wall that can go dark. whenever he or she wants privacy, there's screens on every wall they can actually have. And you'll appreciate this from your time in the White House. They can actually now have G8 meetings of foreign leaders. And they did it after the Ukraine war live in the situation room. They can bring in 8 to 10 foreign leaders and have a virtual meeting at this point in a way they never could before.

But now when somebody walks into the room, they can also wipe the screens immediately of all classified information. It is high tech. He had a couple of the GA people in there talking and you could see them on the screens. I'm going to read you a quote from Jack Kennedy. I want you to respond to it. And then I want to talk a little bit about the current state of affairs in the situation room. This is a direct quote from Jack Kennedy. And he says, and I quote, these brass hats have one great advantage in their favor, he said.

If we, if we do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later. to tell them that they were wrong. And he was specifically talking about Curtis LeMay. Do you remember Curtis LeMay? Of course, but. Yeah, so tell us, Jack Kennedy had a distrust of the American military. He certainly happened to the reasons he set up the situation room. He felt that they were often putting him in a corner, and Bobby Kennedy reinforced that view.

He didn't want to be pushed into that corner at all. You know, it's interesting. You'd say aligned it to current events, interestingly, the role that Joe Biden, President Biden played in the Obama White House was to push back on President Obama's behalf against those brass hats against the generals who he felt were pushing for a longer commitment and a higher commitment to the war in Afghanistan than was wise. And he would often run point for the president in pushing back against the generals. But the whole idea of the situation room was to give the president independent control over the various information and intelligence streams coming into the entire government.

So he wouldn't be beholden to his cabinet secretaries, to the military. And, you know, in that sense, And you made the point. The situation room has only gotten more important with every passing here. And it's contributed to the centralization of power inside the White House and probably the expansion of the power of the presidency over the last 60 years. Okay. Well, the book is fantastic. It goes into a lot of stories. I want to delve into them with you.

But before I delve into them with you, tell us firsthand experience. Clinton administration, something obviously long ago, hopefully declassified. Tell us a situation room story from your time in the White House. I'll tell you one funny one, one series. The most serious one was, of course, it was actually after Oklahoma City, you know, when the courthouse was bombed in Oklahoma City. And we were at that point concerned in the immediate hours

after the bombing that, you know, perhaps this was part of a series of bombings that might be taking place across the country. So that was one of the most high-tension moments that I experienced in the situation room. And in fact, I was finally able to find a picture. It's hard to get pictures from inside the situation room. I was finally able to find a picture from that day that we were able to put on the back cover of the book,

showing me deliberating with Clinton and Leon Panetta and a couple of others on that day. Sandy Berger as well. My hair was a little bit longer at that point. You know, I'm at our age, okay? The fact that we're keeping our hair is a great blessing, okay? Stephanopoulos, it's a mitzv from God that both of us are still. Right. Because, you know, we got a lot of bald friends, you and me.

Stephanopoulos, a lot of ballfront. We certainly do. But let me just give the lighthearted story as well. This was actually right in the end of the situation room, which was right next to the White House mess. And that is where I met Robin Williams, who had just come back from looking at the situation. I was down there getting a cup of coffee. And it was so interesting because, you know, he's a comic genius. But, you know, we all have our insecurities.

He was incredibly socially anxious. So instead of having a conversation, he just did bits there for three minutes right there at the White House mess on the threshold of the situation room. And it was, it just always suck in my mind, watching this genius so uncomfortable that really all he could ever do is perform. Well, listen, an amazing guy. And that's a great biography, by the way, on him shortly after his death that was published. But just for our viewers and listeners that are young, what George is referring to, the White House mess also located in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, is staffed by the U.S. Navy.

And so they have chefs in there. And you can go in there if you work for the president. You have an account. It's usually tied to your personal credit card. And you go in there, you can have a meal, you get a takeout, you can get a hamburger, or you can sit down in the mess and have lunch. And although I was in the White House for a short period of time, I did that almost every day because it gave me the opportunity to see other staff members down there.

And I was able to get some conversations and push along some projects. that we were working on. I want to go to President Nixon for a second. I wasn't a lover of the situation room. According to the book, he already set foot in the situation room. Right. It's right there, yeah. And Henry Kissinger said that Nixon was convinced that President Johnson had suffered from Situation Room syndrome. Tell us what that is and tell us whether or not you agree with Dr. Kissinger. It's a great quote. And, you know, Johnson probably used the situation room more than any other president. He was there all the time. He moved his seat from the Oval Office, his favorite chair from the Oval Office down there. He even had Lady Bird serve breakfast to the

staff every once in a while. And he was calling them all hours of the day, night, almost always, about Vietnam. But, you know, one of the things you saw there is that Johnson, who was a master of domestic politics and his, you know, a vacuum cleaner for information, he had 70 phones at his ranch in Texas. He had TVs and phones in every room with the White House. He always wanted to be in contact, and he wanted every piece of information coming out of Vietnam. But, you know, one of the things I learned from researching that experience is that, you know, information isn't always insight. The information that he was getting couldn't tell him how to win the war because it was a war that was unwinnable, and he had sensed that. But he just felt trapped by it all. Nixon was

determined, and Kissinger were determined not to get caught in that same trap. And what, what Kissinger meant by the Situation Room Syndrome was this idea that you could control the world from that windowless room in the White House, which you can't, but you can do an awful lot, make a lot of consequential decisions in there. There was a different reason, though, an additional reason why Nixon did not go to the Situation Room. He didn't trust the Situation Room. He didn't trust the foreign policy professionals. Remember, he and Kissinger famously tapped the phones of many of their national security staff. And in that way, I think he shared something with the president you served for a short period of time, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump didn't trust the situation room either. He considered it the home of the deep state. He hardly ever used it as well. Well, I mean, it's a funny story about Kissinger and Donald Trump. And so now Trump has won the election. It's December of 2016. And I had the opportunity to escort Dr. Kissinger into president-elect Trump's office, 26-floor Trump Tower.

And Dr. Kissinger, he must have spent 15 minutes with Trump, which is a long time for. Donald Trump, particularly at that time. And watch me, George, ready? Boob, and so Trump looks over at me. He's like, what is he saying? And I said, well, I got to get a little closer to him. So his accent was such that Donald Trump stopped listening after like three minutes.

But what he was saying, and I want you to react to it. Okay, what Dr. Gissinger was saying is that we needed to pay more attention to Russia. And we needed to be more wary of Russia. but to treat them like a respectful adversary, he said that the wound that Obama inflicted, calling Putin a regional power, which was blasted all over the press, had hurt President Putin's standing in Russia, and he was seeking retribution for that. Anyway, it was a memorable moment for me, because I hadn't spent much time in my life with Dr. Kissinger. That was probably the second or third time I had met him. But he moved the White House, and you write about it in the book.

Dr. Gissinger in the Situation Room, move the military alert level to DefCon 3. Tell us a little bit about that. Tell us why. This is October 73. It's the Yom Kippur War, the first Yom Kippur War in Israel. Israel has been attacked. And it's the height of the Cold War as well. It's also the height of Watergate.

In that same month, Vice President Agnew had resigned under indictment. The tapes had been released. The articles have been have been people. had been drawn up. Nixon is under siege, and he is basically holed up in his private office in the old executive office building, drinking scotch late into the night and, you know, listening to Broadway tunes on his record player while this crisis is playing out across the Middle East, a crisis which threatens to go nuclear. And the concern of Henry Kissinger at the time is that Russia was going to get involved on behalf of the Egyptians and Israel's other adversaries.

And so on his own, without the involvement of the president at all, there's no evidence at all the president was involved in the decision-making that night. Henry Kissinger raised the alert level of our nuclear forces at DefCon 3, which had only been done once before during the Cuban missile crisis. Extraordinary that a national security advisor would do that on his own. What I love about it, we learn about this from a memo that was written by someone in the room, one of his military aids, Admiral Moore, who called it a piss swiss-swish, of a meeting. I never heard that word before.

You're right about you. And then one of the other things I learned as I was researching this book, not only did Henry Kissinger make this move, which by the way did work by putting the forces on DefCon 3, it did sort of back the Russians off a little bit. But what I also learned, and it came out many years later from the Russian, the Soviet archives, is that not only was Nixon incapacitated at that time, drunk, depressed, concerned he was losing his president. he was losing his presidency. Brezhnev was kind of in the same state. Brezhnev was in his dacha outside of Moscow on sleeping pills and vodka. And it was, you know, the superpowers were kind of acting on

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it. Yeah, what you say? Because, you know, the world's moving and it's not, what did Charles Agall stay? There's a graveyard filled with men. Indesmissible. Right. We once thought they were indispensable. So, we did a little research on you.

You're born on February the 10th. I won't give the year of your birth because you and I, we look so good, Stephanopoulos, that we should be lying about our age at this point in our lives. But you were born on February 10th, it makes you an Aquarius. I am. And I'm a lot older than you. You're not that much older than me, believe it or not, okay? I don't know.

I just turned 60, so I'm getting up there, my friend. But in any event, you're an Aquarius. There are four presidents that are Aquarians of significance. I'm going to tell you who they are, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, who's born two days after you on February 12th, Ronald Reagan on February 6th, and of course, there's FDR born on January 30th, 1882. Oh, wow. And so that's the horoscope moment for Open Book. Now let's go to the psychic moment.

I'm going to go to the psychic moment of open book. He's a story in the book. Okay. And this is a story that surprised you the most. And it obviously surprised me. Jimmy Carter used psychics during the Iran hostage crisis. So tell us what you uncovered there. Incredible story, which I had never heard before.

I was, you know, we were doing our research. And I came across a single line in Jimmy Carter's presidential diary. It was from May 1980. And it said, had a meeting in the situation room on parapsychology. longitude, latitude, et cetera. And in one line, but it obviously piqued my interest because it had parapsychology and situation room in the same sentence. And I'm writing a book about the situation room.

This meeting had never been written before we, my team and I looked through all the published materials, couldn't find anything written about this meeting. But working through the Carter Library, we were able to figure out who might still be alive who would know something about that meeting. Because one of the other people in the meeting was Big Niafraginski. Of course, he's passed away. But I was able to find a man named Jake Stewart, who was President Carter's naval aide. And we found out that he might have been in that meeting.

So I emailed him. I called him. He was very reluctant to speak. Finally, after about three emails and several conversations, he finally agreed to do the Zoom. And we set up the Zoom. We start the interview. And I said, this May 1980 meeting, tell me about this meeting. And he just sat back, smiled and laughed and said, you found out about that, huh?

And proceeded to tell me the most incredible story. This is May 1980. This is two weeks after the failed rescue mission of the Iran hostages, which basically crippled the Carter presidency. Carter is desperate. He's running. He's running against Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is doing well in the polls.

Inflation is high. The economy is stuck in the mud. He needs to do something. And his rescue mission has failed. So he's desperate times called for desperate measures, right? he's willing to consider anything. It turns out that Jake Stewart was the expert in the White House on something I didn't know much about. There is a whole group of psychics being run by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. They called them remote viewers. And these were

people who would sit in dark rooms and theoretically use ESP to get to the bottom of international crises. It was called Operation Grill Flame. Some people swear that it had some reasonable success, you know, would be right, 30 to 40% of the time that they were able to call the, that they were able to find out about a plane crash in Africa where several were killed. According to one report, one of the remote viewers had had a vision of helicopters crashing in the desert on the same day that the helicopters did indeed crash in the desert. So anyway, Jake Stewart goes to the situation from him. It's just him, the president, speaking of Varsinski, and interestingly, Rosalind Carter, the first lady, You don't hear about first ladies in the situation room at all.

But that was because she was kind of a big believer in psychics and ESP. She had become a friend of, remember Uri Geller? Yeah, sure. Of course. He could bend the spoons. Yeah, of course. She had had a several hours long meeting with him. She believed in it.

So they called Jake Stewart in. He gives them an entire briefing on the work of government psychics in the CIA and the intelligence community. Carter doesn't say a word. And at the end of this briefing, he takes out his notepad and simply writes, one word on it and pushes it across the table to Stewart. You can guess what the word was. Hostages. Figure out where the hostages might be. Stuart took it on. He maintains that through the work of the psychics, they were able to locate one of the hostages, Richard McQueen, who was

suffering from multiple sclerosis and able to figure out where he was and that he was actually taken out later that summer. Of course, the rest of the hostages were not released until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated several months later. What an incredible story. And I'm sorry, glad that you were able to regal it here. We're coming to the last few minutes of this podcast. I want to just ask you one quick question about the 6th of January, 2021, which happens to be my birthday, George. So for the first 50s, for the first 57 years of my life, I was enjoying that birthday. Now it's Trump Insurrection Day. That's 836 has become kind of a swear word. Yeah, exactly. So it happens to be my birthday. I think

there's a lot of irony in that, right? So it's also Eric Trump's birthday, by the way. Mike Stigler, Tell us what he said, and then we'll go to the famous five words and we'll have you blocked out of the podcast. Michael Stiegler, amazing guy. It had been on his bucket list to work in the White House, intelligence analyst. He was finally assigned to the White House with about 18 months to go in the Trump administration. So he lived through all the turmoil, through COVID, through the Black Lives Matter protests, through the carrying of the Bible to Lafayette Square. And then he was in the situation room on January 6th.

And, you know, think about what it must have been like to be an intelligence analyst. in the Situation Room that day. The Situation Room has been the nerve center of the White House for 60 years. They've dealt with the assassination of one President, John F. Kennedy, the attempted assassination of another Ronald Reagan. They were on their posts on 9-11 when the country was under attack. It was the heart of the White House where the most consequential national security decisions were made, but never before had these professionals to serve in that room, had to be in the middle of the crisis center of the White House to handle a crisis and insurrection inspired by the president himself. And it was what Mike Stiegler had to do on that day, he was in direct contact with the

Secret Service who were with Vice President Pence. One of the things he told me is, you know, what still haunts him is the idea that we still don't know he said how close we came to losing the vice president. At the very moment that Donald Trump is sitting up there in his study, sipping Diet Coke's and sending out a tweet attacking the vice president as a coward. He also described to me how they had to implement what we call the continuity of government operations. You're probably familiar with this from your time in the White House. This was something established by Eisenhower to establish procedures to ensure the survival of the government if we were under nuclear attack. They actually started to implement the continuity of government procedures,

you know, figuring out whether they would have to evacuate cabinet members to remote locations, figuring out who would move up the chain of command if others were taken out. This had not, this had only been done once before in modern times, and that was on 9-11. It was done. on January 6th because of this insurrection inspired by the president. It shook Mike Stiegler. It shook him to the core. No, listen, you've written an amazing book, and great stories.

And, of course, Vice President Pence, unlike Kamala Harris, Vice President Pence is not endorsing the former president. So it's an interesting situation. Okay, so we have five famous words on this podcast, Mr. Stephanopoulos. I read out the word or the phrase, and then I ask our authors to react. Okay. And so you can give me a sentence, a word,

something that comes into mind. I say Clinton, and you think of what? Complicated. Okay. I say the year, 2024, you think? Consequential. Yeah. Okay, well said. Very consens. I'll add the very. Okay, how's that? Okay. I'll say the three words, the Oval Office. Center of power. Sublime light. Yeah, a lot smaller than I thought, by the way, my first time in it, I was like, you know, it's a lot small. The whole West Wing is smaller than you can imagine. But, boy, there's nothing like being in that Oval Office. No, there's nothing like being in that Oval Office.

My first day in that office, Trump looked at me, said, you and I both like action. You can't get much more action than this. There's literally an exact quote. Okay, okay, so crisis. Crisis are the moments to define our lives. Okay, okay. So crossroads, right, an inflection point, right? Okay. And then, of course, the last word and the title of your book, I say the situation room, the inside story of presidents in crisis. I say the situation room. You say what? Buy it. All right. That's a good one. Okay. Well, I bought it. And let me tell you some. This is a great book. It's going to be a New York Times bestseller. There will be professors around the country that will be assigning this book. It's a seminal work and it's a work that's going to go up there with the Allison's.

and the McGeorge Bundys and even Jack Kennedy's brother, Bobby Kennedy. Thank you for joining us on Open Book. I hope to see you soon. Me too. Take care. It's fascinating to hear George talk about the situation room. Of course, I have had the fortune or the misfortune to be in that room because, of course, when you're going into that room, there's usually a problem. And lots of decisions have been made, and if those walls could talk,

I think people would be fascinated by it. And this is the reason why I want you to go out and read George's book because George has gotten some inside dope on what's really happened over the years in the room. And it's interesting to consider how each president relied on the room differently. I'm still laughing about the LBJ moments where he was soldered to the seat in the situation room. And of course, then you have more aloof presidents like Trump. But I think it's a fascinating thing. One of the things that they did, which I think people do know about, and George does write about, is they renovated that room and they brought it up to date into the modern era. So it has just about every telecommunications, satellite awareness technology.

It has a television feed, believe it or not, from every local news station and every cable news station in the world is fed into that room. And so there isn't a place you can go in America that has access to more information. and the White House Situation Room, and yet the great irony, information going in, but there's a lot of opakness about the information leaving the room because so many confidential things happen there. So read George's book. It'll give you a bird's eye view or a nice listening ear into that situation, room, and what it means in American history.

So it's a fabulous book, go out and get it. All right, Ma, you want to come on the show? So this week I had George Stephanopoulos on. He's the host of the Sunday show. guy, yes. He's the great guy. You've seen him on TV, right? Of course. All right, so he's written this new book about what it's like to work in the White House, and there's a special room in the basement called the Situation Room, and this is where all the important decisions are made. So let me ask you this, Ma, when you, you're a typical American citizen, what do you think

goes on in the White House day to day? I think that people in the White House, I'm not saying everyone, but they all have a story that's not always good. They're a little bit crazy. Why is that, you think, Mom? The prestige of being in the White House. So it attracts some sociopaths and some crazy people then, right? Mm-hmm. The power of it, right?

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Do you think Joe Biden's a sociopath? I think Joe Biden is old. But you don't think he's a bad guy, though, right? No, he's not bad, but he's old, and he has... He's probably old. He's probably too old for you, right?

You wouldn't date him. right, he's too old, right? Ma. Yeah, he's too old. Oh, you're so nuts. Oh, my God. Oh, I'm nuts. He's too old.

You don't want to make me, you know. What do you think made me nuts? You made me nuts. You made me nuts. I made you nuts, but I made you colorful. All right, good, Ma. Thank you, Ma. I do appreciate that.

Everyone could use a little color from Marie Scaramucci in their life. All right. You're colorful. Thank you, Ma. All right, baby. All right, baby. All right. Love you, babe.

Bye. I am Anthony Scaramucci. and that was open book, thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram.

I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.