"The Biggest Mistake I've Ever Made" | Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary & "The Mooch" Anthony Scaramucci

What do you tell them about building their own net worth and how to go forward and not trip up in that aspect?

So many kids come out of college $80,000 in debt and they go straight downward from there. What advice do you give young kids in terms of starting their careers and taking care of themselves financially? I was that kid. I came out of school in 1989 with six figures plus in debt between Tufts and Harvard. My parents didn't have the money to pay for it, so I had to pay for it.

And here's what I would tell kids:

[Music]

I have a fantastic guest with me today on Ask Mr. Wonderful. A good friend of mine, we've met each other through different sources and definitely television: Anthony Scaramucci. What an interesting, I guess, career this guy's had and I want to talk to him about it. We can all learn something from it, but you know there are a lot of topics and only little time, so I'm going to try and guide our discussion through things we can collectively learn.

You know I got to start with the White House because we are going through an extraordinary week. We're on the cusp of an administrative change. You're a very interesting guy in this. Can I call you Tony for the sake of this interview?

Well, I usually go by Anthony or Mooch, but I'm in. I just, I'm in so much... What I would rather call you is Mooch. I know you as Mooch. I'm calling you Tony. I'm having a very good day. I've already had one bottle of Cristal, so I was getting ready for this podcast. I thought that was the right nurturing thing to do. And so yeah, you call me anyone, Kev. I think you know I love calling you Mr. Wonderful, but I'll tell you who loves calling you Mr. Wonderful more than anybody: my sons. They couldn't believe that I knew you. That was one of those father-son moments where I was putting on my muscles, you know, my name-dropping muscles to say, "Hey, not only do I know Mr. Wonderful, we're going to have dinner with you."

Yeah, it was great. It was great. And you have a restaurant you’re partnered in, that I just love, and I hang out there all the time in those good old days.

Now, Mooch, let's go back to why you're having a good day. You actually started your political journey in the White House. You're an advocate for President Trump. You worked for him. You had a very interesting journey in there. You were incredibly good at your job, I thought, because you have a great TV persona and you were part of communicating Trump’s message.

Let's start there. How did you, because we're talking about people that want to learn about creating careers for themselves, how did you get into the White House? How the hell did that happen?

Okay, so I… if it's okay, and first of all thank you, it's a huge honor to be on this, so thank you so much. But I want to go back a little because I think this will help younger people that love you and probably watch a lot of the things that you do.

I want to just set the scene for you — it's 1989. I'm 25 years old, I'm graduating from Harvard Law School and my parents thought it was Hartford Law School. Okay, they had no clue. Right? Just give us a blue-collar family. Right? And so I have no network, Kevin. I have no ability to meet anybody.

I'm at Goldman. I got to build a network because I'm in the financial services high net worth space. They give you a desk and a telephone—go build a network and bring in accounts. Well, I didn't know what to do, and so I started political fundraising. I wrote my first check for Rudolph Giuliani in 1989 for $250.

And so you're looking at—I'm going to now fast forward 31 years—you’re looking at the garden variety Republican fundraiser from New York that happened to have two successful hedge fund management businesses. That’s all I am.

Then accidentally, Mr. Trump—I’m going to call him that for a second because he was a candidate then—wins the election. Four years ago, I was one of his fundraisers. He found me effective on television, so he would put me on perpetually. Then during the transition, he made me one of the key transition spokespeople. They put me on. And then he came to me and said, "I want you to come work for me."

Now, I said no. I was hosting Wall Street Week, which you would have been an amazing guest on for the Fox Business Channel. I said, "I like my career. I like my job. I built my business. I don't feel like selling my business." He said, "Oh no, I'm the President of the United States. You're going to come work for me."

And I got tantalized. I got tempted. And so, first learning lesson for young kids: Keep your ego in check. Keep your pride in check. Because when you put your pride and ego into your decision-making, your intelligence is going down on the stock chart and your emotions are going up, and you start making really disastrous decisions.

So my wife—who you've met probably—dislikes Donald Trump almost as much as Melania Trump dislikes him. I mean almost. I mean you don't have—she's up here and he's there, but it's close. Okay? You got to give Melania the top billing, but she's up there. And she said, "Don't do it. It'll be very bad for you. You guys are going to end up being oil and water. You're both bosses. Don't do it." But I got intoxicated, Kevin.

Here I am—a blue-collar kid from Long Island. I made some measure of success on Wall Street. Now I'm going to have a chance to work for the President of the United States. And so Reince Priebus and a guy named Steve Bannon blocked that job that was supposed to be his OPL director, which is basically his chief networking officer.

So I called President Trump. I said, "Hey, these guys don't want me to come down there. That's fine. I think they're bad guys. If you want to ever get rid of those two guys, call me up. I'll come down and fix it for you."

And I went back to my job. He calls me and he says, "You're right about these guys. Come down. I want to talk to you." And then, this is where I make colossal mistake number four billion—you know like H&R Block, you know the different lessons—I make colossal mistake four billion.

I say yes, and I take a job that I am not qualified for. I take a job that a comms director who knows the Beltway should be in. But I’m decent on TV, you know? I’m not hopefully not praising myself. Mr. Trump at least thinks that. He said, "You can be my comms director. You’ll help me clean up the White House. Let's get going."

Mooch, are you telling young people not to jump at opportunity? I mean, is that the message?

I'm telling people to jump at opportunity that are good for them. I'm telling them, you know, don't take the cool job or don't take the ego-based job. Take the job you think you're going to be really good at and take the job that you think you’re not going to work—you know you love your job, okay?

The reason why you're forever young—and God willing, 30 years from now you'll invite me back on this podcast when this is episode 2 million—and you will still be Mr. Wonderful forever young. Why? Because you're doing something that you love—that Shark Tank station.

So the lesson is take the opportunity to think you can excel at it and you love it and you're passionate about it—yes! Because then you're not working. But now I'm in the White House, I'm like a fish out of water. These are very different people from us, Kevin. I told all my Wall Street buddies, I want you to imagine the worst person you ever met on Wall Street. You got that person in your head? That's the Eagle Scout in Washington. That's the best person.

That's like the vicar of morality in Washington. And so now I'm there and those guys are trying to kill me and I'm trying to kill them. And then I make this colossal mistake. I'm on the phone with a reporter who I thought was my friend and I'm a little jocular, and I say something ridiculously off-color about Steve Bannon, you know I was talking about maybe something that he probably can't do unless he’s really into flexibility in hot yoga. I’ll let your podcast people look it up what I said he was doing in his own office. And I said, "Really? You’re going to write that about me? I said you’re going to get me fired." And the guy said, "Yeah, I'm going to write it." I said, "Why are you being so transactional?"

So learning lesson number two: Don’t be transactional. Build long-term relationships.

Well, I think Mooch you’re really saying don’t talk to a reporter and think that it's all off the record. They’re going to take advantage of a comment you made. Even if you think the person is your friend, their skull scorpion and they’re gonna bite you for that story and I made that mistake. And by the way, that is a rookie mistake, okay? That I should have never made that mistake. But here was a guy whose family had a 50-year relationship with my family. Our parents had known each other since 1967. And I trusted him and that was a mistake. You know, and he totally screwed you over. He basically ran with it. He had the right to do that because I didn't say to him, "This is off the record."

Kevin, you follow what I'm saying? So you're not putting all the blame on him. You didn't say it was off the record. You didn't think about it. Learning lesson number three, four, or five, whatever it is: Be accountable. I made a mistake, I did something fireball. I got fired. It's my fault. I didn't do what the Scarecrow did in the Wizard of Oz. I'm not blaming anybody else. I'm not saying it was this guy's fault, that guy's fault.

Well, not my fault. What happened to you? You know what? I said something stupid. It was fireball for a job like that and two days later I got fired and I walked out of there and I said, "Okay, fine. Nothing personal. I'm gonna still support President Trump. I'm gonna try to help out the Republican agenda."

But it became impossible, Kevin. The guy is nuts. He’s nuts, okay?

So let's talk about there are fantastic lessons here for people that are pursuing careers. I love the fact that you're willing to be accountable for your mistakes. I totally agree with that. You got to be transparent. You got to take the hit. You got to learn from it.

Now you leave the White House and this is where, you know, I start running into you on television. We’re doing all kinds of stuff together here and there. You are amazing on TV and that's—you’re not going to lose that talent—that's the way it is.

I'm not a shark. Look at you. I mean, the other thing about it is, walk me through the transition. You're a Trump advocate. You're actually in his White House. You're communicating his message. And then a matter of months later, all of a sudden, I mean, I got a wake-up call. Somebody calls me saying, "Turn on the TV, listen to what Mooch is doing on Trump. You're not going to believe this."

And lo and behold, you were going in a different direction. Mooch, what happened there?

Two years though. So I left the White House July 31, 2017. On August 8, 2019, I’m on the Bill Maher show, Kevin. I am defending President Trump. Comments are coming under the economy. I defend them. Comments are coming in on regulation, I defend him. Comments are coming in on judicial appointments, I’m defending him.

And then Bill turns to me and says, "Well, what about these comments he made about the squad?" And just for everybody listening, those are four congresswomen—two are African-American, one’s Hispanic-American, one’s a Muslim-American—their radical left in our country. Mr. Trump, the president, said, "Go back to the countries that you originally came from."

And so Bill Maher asked me what I thought of that tweet. I said, "I don't like that." I said, "They told my Italian-American grandparents a hundred years ago to go back to the countries." Really, it’s a racist nativist trope, quote. I really wish the president would not say that.

Okay, now we're at the after party. I don't know if you’ve done the show—we probably have. We’re having a soda pop together. He turns to me and says, "You know Trump’s not going to like that. He's going to tweet at you tonight."

I said, "Bill, why would he do that? I gave him and I raised him millions of dollars. I was on his transition team. I’ve been an advocate for him in the media." He goes, "Nah, Trump’s a demigod. You got to go 13 for 10 for Trump and you were seven for eight for Trump tonight. He’s gonna hit you on Twitter."

I said, "Okay, let me tell you, he’s not gonna do that. I’ll take the opposite side of that. But if he does, then I’m done with the guy because then he really is a demagogue. I’m trying to support him."

The next day I'm at Craig's, a restaurant I have seen you in. You and I hang out in there. You and I like the same places: Beverly Hills Hotel, Craig's. And I'm at Craig's and I'm talking to Craig, and boom! On my phone, I'm getting blasted by the President of the United States.

Now let me tell you, your listeners something. You see this piece of paper? Your face goes as white as this piece of paper.

Anybody that tells you they can take the heat from an incoming presidential tweet when he's calling you a lowlife or an unstable nut job—no, you can't. You get very pale. Your buddy Jay Seris is sitting at the table with me. I said, "Do you believe this?" And you could ask Jay—he's quiet, white like this.

I went into the bathroom at Craig's. I literally threw water on my face and I said, "This son of a..." I'm gonna go and respond to it and I did. I hit him pretty hard because, you know, I'm a pretty good troller, I think. So, you know, I’m a New Yorker. We know how to troll.

So you got into a Twitter fight with the President of the United States?

I think I called him Fidel Adolf Trump because I knew that the initials was F.A.T. So it was like the notorious F.A.T. So I had to get the fat shaming in there with the fact that — so much — what do you think the outcome of that—what—how could that possibly be a good thing when you’re fighting?

I mean, in anybody's career, to be in a fight with the President of the United States, the office of the United States?

I mean, first of all, just that'd be a great thing though. I thought it was a great thing because, because listen—learning lessons for your people, okay—principles stand on your principles, don't back down. If you think you're right, you know morality. If you've got a moral center and somebody's talking about somebody with racist invective, it's okay to admit that you don't like that and you think it's racist.

You don’t have to change your whole personality or move the moral goal posts in your life to support the President of the United States. Be honest about it. Call balls and strikes.

So no, I think it's a good thing. Now he’s hitting me, so I’m hitting him. And then Kevin, you're not going to believe this—or maybe you will believe it—he goes after my wife. Is this guy nuts? He goes after my wife. She is a suburban housewife on Long Island. He knows her and I were having marital problems when I was working for him. He starts attacking my wife on Twitter.

I told his team, that’s it for me. You’re not going after my wife. Kevin, take a look, get closer to me. Do I look like Ted Cruz to you? Just take a look. Does this look like Ted Cruz?

No.

So you basically go after my wife. And so now the fight starts.

I want to glean from this for all of our listeners who are young millennials looking for career advice. You’re basically saying you have a moral compass and you cannot stray from it. Is that basically your message?

100%. Because let me tell you something about your business and my business, you know the asset management side of your business. Let me emphasize: it is about integrity. The market is going to go up. The market’s going to go down. You’re going to make a decision—or at least I certainly will—on a bad investment. I may buy something at $10 and it goes to $5. But if I'm honest about it and I'm open about it and I have integrity, my clients are going to be with me through thick and thin.

And so what clients can see from a person—so wait a minute—they got integrity, they’re going to hold their ground, they’re going to stand on their two feet, they’re not going to be intimidated—that's somebody I want to go to war with. That's somebody I want by my side helping me with my situation in life. And so it’s been very beneficial in my business.

Yes, did some Trump supporters leave? Certainly, they did. And some did. Some non-Trump supporters joined my business? Certainly, they did.

But Mooch, let me ask you a question that I think everybody asks me about politics. You ventured in there. You explained how you got there. I have learned as a television person—and I’ve been told this multiple times by various network executives: Don’t stray into politics, because half of your audience is the other side. And when you do that, you hurt our ability to grow our programming, to get our message out.

I mean, obviously Shark Tank is about entrepreneurship and inspiration about building your own business, and it's very important to me. Obviously, I've been doing it for 12 years. But when you go down the road of politics, it doesn't matter which side you go on. You're alienating half the population and it’s very costly in doing. And you went from one side to the other side. You basically did a full round trip on this thing because you're no longer an advocate for Trump.

You were at the beginning—not really. So everything you said, I'm going to agree with a thousand percent. My mistake was I should have stayed as a garden variety Republican fundraiser and no one would have mattered what my politics were. That's fine. You're allowed to give your money to anybody you want.

And as Michael Jordan said—and perhaps your producers say—you know, Republicans buy sneakers, and they watch TV shows. And so do Democrats. Michael Jordan always was, "Hey, you’re a Democrat or Republican.” He said, "Oh, both sides buy sneakers." That is the right thing to do in business.

So please, if you're listening, don't follow my path. But my path, Kevin, is an accidental one. My path is filled with the pitfall of ego. The trap door came down on me when I went into politics. It opened, and when I fell in there, I got stuck. Now I’m the Michael Corleone of politics, okay? I'm trying to get out and they keep bringing me back in.

Okay? And so what am I going to do? I got to have a position and I have to have a message. My message is anti-demagoguery, and my message is anti-people that are trying to subvert our democracy. I'm a Republican—lifelong Republican. I'm a moderate Republican. When this is over, I'd like to return to my business and grow my business and focus on my life and my family.

But what I'm not going to do is, I'm not going to sit there in the country that I love and we got a guy blowing racist dog whistles: "No low-income housing in the white suburbs." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" I lived in an area that was surrounded by low-income housing. Those Blacks and Hispanics I lived with grew up and created great businesses—businesses that you would be proud to invest in on Shark Tank. What is this guy talking about?

I don't like it, okay? So I spoke out about it. I then figured out I was doing something wrong. I was going to white ethnics, which I happen to be. I said, "Don't vote for Trump." Turns out they were going to double vote for him. So I went into the African American community. I said, "Look, who's this guy doing?" And we increased their voter turnout, and we had a successful outcome. But by the way, I'm very happy that the Senate looks like it will be in the control of the Republicans.

Yeah, I mean before we leave politics, I have to get your take on where we're at. This has been an extraordinary election week. It's been very, very crazy. I mean they’re still counting votes and all of that stuff. But, you know, it's looking like the path for a Trump re-election is getting narrower and narrower as it's getting tighter in these battleground states.

But also, which stunned me—and I'm sort of in your camp too—there is no blue wave. So both parties have learned something radical about the positioning they took. I mean telling people that they are that vote for Trump—whether you like them or not—telling them that they're immoral doesn’t look like that worked out for the Democrats. And, you know, Trump’s positioning, as you’ve detailed, doesn’t look like it captured enough of the urban voter.

And so what take are you taking from this election? What is your message from it?

Let me give you three things, okay? The Trump voter is not deplorable, okay? And the Trump voter is not a racist. I grew up with the Trump voter. I understand the Trump voter. And the Trump voter is a clarion call of disaffection from what is going on in the system.

The Trump voter is saying, "This system is not working for me. I am poorer. My family is poor." The family I grew up in, Kevin—and we've had this conversation at dinner—I grew up in an aspirational working-class family. My father said, "Go to school, you’re going to live the American dream."

That very same family has to deal with a 26% decrease in living wages. So now that family’s not in the middle class anymore. And so in a generation, we went from working-class aspiration to working-class desperation. And those people don't like the establishment. They don’t like the media. It is a vote for themselves. It’s not necessarily the second lesson: it's not necessarily a vote for Mr. Trump.

There are aspects of his personality they don’t like, but he doesn’t represent the establishment, so therefore they’re voting. If they had a different messenger, it was less of a bully, less of the bellicosity of rhetoric, that person would have likely won by a landslide.

You can’t lie about the science of COVID. You can't disrupt the American economy. You can’t denigrate, you know, the Prime Minister of Canada and all the Democratic leaders of the West. At some point, that’s going to come back to bite you.

So the third lesson is the radical left and the quote-unquote blue wave does not work for this country either. And I would use an example of Corbynism. You know who Jeremy Corbyn is because you are Canadian. Jeremy Corbyn was a hard left-leaning guy that was running for Prime Minister. He got annihilated in the United Kingdom, and so you can't run a radical left agenda in the United States.

This is a group of immigrants who are risk-taking entrepreneurs. And so there was an interesting mixture: they split their tickets. They voted for Joe Biden— that was good for their soul—and they voted for their Republican representative in the Congress or the Senate that was good for their pocketbook.

And so you’re going to get, hopefully, a mixed outcome in the government, which the market likes, Kevin, as you know, because the market likes that mixed government, right?

So, that’s where we are right now. My attitude is Mr. Trump should leave. He lost the election. The only reason why they haven't sanctified the election yet is they’re preparing for a lawsuit. So all the secretaries of states of those states that are up in this dispute are triple-checking every vote. So when they have the lawsuit, they can put this guy lights out.

But you agree, you do agree, Mooch, that he should fight for his voters? I mean, Trump should do whatever he has to do to show that he cares about the 60-plus million people that voted for him. I mean you got to fight for your team and I understand when it’s over it’s over, but you have to fight. You agree with that, don’t you?

I agree with that, but you’re in overtime right now. And when you say, quote-unquote, "I may or may not accept the peaceful transfer of power," and you are the leader of the free world sitting atop of the oldest Republican democratic experiment in the world, it is a very bad look.

I have no problem with fighting for your voters. I have no problem with being an advocate for people, but you lost, okay? And the irony is you’ve lost by a bigger factor than you beat Secretary Clinton. If you look at the vote totals and you look at the outcome in the electoral college, it’s about 306. Same as he beat me.

He said that his 306 electoral victory was a landslide. So then definitionally, Joe Biden has beat him by a landslide.

And so therefore be a man, put your big boy pants on. When I got fired, I said, "Hey, my fault, see you guys, no bitterness." Trump is acting like a baby! You got to cut it out.

I want to, Mooch, I want to use some of our time for other matters. Let's leave politics alone. You now—there are a lot of people that are interested in your television career. They want to understand because a lot of people are interested in the media today. It's not just TV, it's social media, it's reaching your message out there.

You've been phenomenally successful. You've worked on multiple networks. You seem to have some engagement with people that they like on television. Let’s help people that want to start their career journey. Give some tips to someone young that would like to get into broadcast television, broadcast social media, broadcast YouTube—all of these new channels. What advice?

Let’s say, I would say get long Kevin O’Leary and slightly short Anthony Scaramucci. Let me explain why. Because Kevin O’Leary is doing it better than Anthony Scaramucci.

How is he doing it better?

Stay out of politics! Okay? Number one. Number two, okay? Do what Kevin O'Leary does. You are a boat lifter. Okay? The reason why all of these kids like you is you’re a boat lifter. You're a rising tide that’s lifting boats. You look at those businesses; you're like, "Yeah, I want these people to succeed. I want them to reach the arc of their personal and financial fulfillment."

So be that person. If you want to talk about what makes you good on TV or why you think I’m halfway decent—well, let’s just say the generic attributes that someone should think about.

A young person that’s just coming out of college saying, "I want to be that Mooch guy on TV. How the hell do I get there? How do I do it? I mean, what can I do, and what attribute should I have?"

Well, I would say my career on TV is accidental. I never… my first television appearance was when I was 46. But if you really want to do this, then you got to practice. It’s 10,000 hours of practice. I, in 2009—you'll enjoy this story—I had President Bill Clinton at my SALT conference, which hopefully someday I can get you to.

And he said to me, "You know, you're pretty good on TV. I see you on CNBC. Who’s your media coach?" And I said, "President Clinton, I don't have a media coach." He goes, "Oh, that's a mistake. Doesn’t Tiger Woods have a golf coach?"

And I said, "Yes, he does." He says, "Okay, I’m going to put you in touch with my media coach." And so I did. 15 hours of media training with a guy named Michael Sheehan—may know Michael; he’s down in D.C. and he helped me think about where the camera was. He helped me think about where my hands were helped me think about how I was going to gesticulate and talk to people.

And he said something to me that I will never forget that I will share with everybody on this podcast.

If you’re subjected to stage fright—I don’t know Shark Tank probably has 15 or 20 million viewers, so when you're opening your mouth, 15 or 20 million people are listening to you, or if you’re giving a live presentation, you may have some anxiety.

He told me something I will never forget. I’m going to share it with everybody on this podcast: Each one of those people, Kevin, you could have a one-on-one conversation with each one of those people. You’d be totally comfortable. You walked into their living room and said, "Hello, I’m Kevin. I’m Anthony." And you start talking.

So you just imagine yourself doing that and just experientially grow it to those people because they're all people that you could get along with in a one-on-one conversation. So therefore, dial right into the conversation that you’re in in the moment and relax.

And the minute you do that, the camera picks up that you’re doing that and then the people watching you relax. If you get to the television and you’re like this and you’re back up in here like that, and you start reading from the page and they see that you’re uncomfortable, then the viewer is losing interest.

But if the viewer sees you as relaxed as, "Oh, I’m getting Kevin O'Leary in his original authentic form on Shark Tank, I’m getting Mark Cuban the way Mark Cuban would be in his living room if he was talking to me directly," that’s how you create your television success.

So what I like about that message—because I’m also going to disclose this—I too have a media coach. I go to him all the time and I just present myself and show them all tape of me or maybe tape from last week. And he’s constantly pointing out mistakes that I make. But I really like this idea that you can constantly be learning how to be better on a medium than constantly changing.

And I think coaching is a fantastic attribute. I agree with you on that.

Let’s move on to another aspect that I wanted to ask you about: you're raising a family. You’ve got kids. How do you coach them about finances in life? What do you tell them about building their own net worth and how to go forward and not tripping up in that aspect?

So many kids come out of college $80,000 in debt and they go straight downward from there. What advice do you give young kids in terms of starting their careers and taking care of themselves financially?

Okay, so I was that kid. I came out of school in 1989 with six figures plus in debt between Tufts and Harvard. My parents didn’t have the money to pay for, so I had to pay for.

And here’s what I would tell kids: go buy The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clayson. It's a book about this big, very thin, maybe 100 pages. You can read it in two hours. And it totally changed my life and it totally changed the way I thought about wealth and savings.

And what did the book say to me when I read it in March? 24: Save a little each month. Pay yourself each month. You’ve said it: Drop the latte and put it in your mutual fund. And all of a sudden it’s a tiny acorn that will eventually grow into an oak tree! And what the richest man in Babylon said, which I thought was so fascinating, is the value of compounding.

And so I’ve heard you say this, so I’m going to repeat it, but I’m going to footnote you. If you had a magic penny and that penny was going to double every day for 30 days, would you rather have that or $10,000 a day for 30 days?

And of course, kids can get tripped up. They say, "Well, $10,000 a day is $300,000. I’ll take that versus the penny." But you know and I know the value of compounding: the penny’s $2, it's $4, it’s $8. By the time you get to the 30th day, it's $5.4 million.

And if we're in July, Kevin, it’s $10.8 million. And the point being is that if you can think like that as a young kid and you can use all that time, I was paying the debt off, but then I was putting $200 into an account. Paid the debt, okay?

$300? Oh, I got a little more money. I’m not gonna buy that bigger car or that bigger house—$400 under my mutual fund, $500 under my mutual fund. All of a sudden I'm sitting on an asset. And then that asset brings me less anxiety because now I know I have a cushion to pay these bills that are coming in every week.

And by the way, I made a note to myself: Always have goals. Like you said, write down your goals. I made a note to myself: The minute I pay off all my school debt, I'm leaving Goldman Sachs to start my first business. And that's what I did.

I was 32 years old, seven years at Goldman. I left and built my first company. I was stunned during the pandemic when we started getting the PPV loans that so many of the employees and the companies I’ve invested in haven’t saved anything.

And I keep telling them, take $100 a week and invest that in something that’s part of the market because over time it’ll compound. By the time you’re 65, you’ll have a million and a half bucks in the bank, even if you just take $100 a week.

So I totally agree with you on that. A little bit about education. What do you tell young people today about investing in college? Because let’s say it’s going to cost them $60,000. Is it worth it?

I mean, you've obviously went through a crazy path—the whole Harvard thing and then the cost of doing that. When you talk to somebody today that’s graduating from high school, what advice would you give them about investing $60,000, $80,000 in debt in themselves?

I would give them the same advice that I would give my children. And like you, I’m an atypical person. I’m willing to be a disrupter. I don’t have to be that status quo tough Harvard robot. My oldest son, who you met, Tufts University, Stanford Business School, worked at Google. He’s now building his own company—that's his path. He would—he wanted that graduate school education.

My 21-year-old son that was taking those pictures of you and me that does the 3D motion photography, he’s now a videographer in L.A. He’s working with Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker, okay? Those are guys that your millennials and your below millennials are Generation Z people that watch. You know he’s their videographer. He’s got over 40 million views on videos that he’s produced.

That’s his dream. He left college to do that. So my message to people is you don’t have to be a college graduate today to fulfill your dream. The flip side though is if you think it’s valuable to you, invest the money in the college and you may even enjoy it.

My older son said to me, "You know what, Dad? I would enjoy the network and if I can get into Stanford Business School, I’m going." Okay, great.

And the good news for him is I was able to pay for it for him. But even if I wasn't, that’s a good investment for him if that’s what he wants to do. So don’t have a cookie-cutter approach. You got to be a Swiss Army knife in life. Find the tool that you think is best for you to use and use that tool.

I think you said one thing there that I want to pick up on that really mattered to me and I've learned through the long journey of it. I don’t remember anything I learned in college, but I still have all the contacts I met right through my MBA and business degree.

And I think that’s the message that I’m hearing that is most important. If you’re going—if you’re going to invest that time—and obviously going to Harvard as the el supremo—but those contacts ended up being very important for you later in life when you were fundraising, when you were in the White House for that brief sin, raising your hedge fund—all that stuff—those people, I assume you’re telling everybody, that was the investment, not the stuff you sat through and learned about variable cost analysis.

Because you remember I also got some education though. You know a little bit of history. You’re able to apply context to modern life. He got a degree in economics, so I understand statistics, which helped me in money management. I did learn some things, but you’re making a big point, which I can’t overemphasize, is the network is invaluable.

But you know what? You may know—and you know I'm talking to individuals out there that are listening to Kevin and I speak—you may know that the network that you're going to in college may not be as significant as a network that you may be able to create in the music industry, or the network you could create in TV.

You know, you have to weigh it. It's a cost-benefit analysis. But here’s the one last thing: You can bounce. You don’t want to be a piece of bone china when you have bad stuff happening to you.

Okay, let’s talk about something bad happen. You haven’t put something a bad day? Think of me getting fired from the White House and getting lit up on late night comedy and going through the Shawshank sewer fight for a year.

Okay, so—and guess what? You can bounce. You can be resilient. You can shake it off. You can use your sense of humor. And so, if you're having a setback in life, don’t let it affect the overall existential power of your positivity or the aura that you're presenting to the rest of the world.

When Stephen Colbert invited me on his show two weeks after I got fired, he said, "Hey Mooch, did you think you were going to last a long time in the White House?" I said, "Stephen, I thought I was going to last longer than a carton of milk in the refrigerator."

And he was getting blown out before the milk spoiled.

And the point is, you know, he looked at me, he said, "Alright, this guy gets it!" He rolled into the pain of what happened to him. I don’t pretend it didn’t happen. I don’t pretend that I did the right thing and other people did the wrong thing. I don’t play the victim say, "Hey, I got nailed." I did something really stupid.

So that may happen to you in your entrepreneurship. I know without knowing this that you’ve had a few setbacks. You've had to have because you've created this unbelievable arc of success in your life. And to do that, you’ve had to take some risk, and I’m sure you stepped on a few landmines over the course of your career.

And it was how you adjusted and adapted that has made you Kevin O’Leary and Mr. Wonderful.

I agree with you. Am I wrong about that?

No, you’re not. And I love that message. It's very important. You have to deal with adversity and you have to move on and learn from it.

I want to touch on one last thing because you’ve been great today. Besides all this focus on work and creating wealth and you know driving business, what do you do to have fun? And how important is that to you, to have a little fun once in a while? Because we’re not going to be on this earth forever. Talk to me about that.

Well, I think, you know, because you and I have had more than one dinner together with our pals. You and I are both fun-loving guys. So the adage work hard, play hard is in the O’Leary-Scaramucci gene, boy! I think we both know that.

But what I would tell people is there’s a time and place for everything and you should be able to enjoy yourself. But if you pick a good job and you pick a job that you love, you’re going to love the job. You know, I went to go see David Rubenstein, you know David?

Yeah, he’s up in Nantucket. His front door—beautiful house on the bluff—you walk up to the front door, there’s a sign on the door. It says, "I’d rather be working." And it’s his wry sense of humor to let you know he’s got this beautiful house on the bluff and ocean and everything, but he likes working.

And he’s chosen that for his life, you know? And so the point I’m making is it’s okay. Don’t judge yourself. And you don’t have to be the guy in Esquire magazine that has everything.

But you have to be the guy or the woman that is doing what you want to do with the life and the portfolio of time that you have. So for me, I'm a big reader. You can see these books back here. Room Raider doesn’t like them because they’re on a horizontal—you see them back there?

Yeah, but I'm a big reader. I’m a—I love sports and athletics. You know, I owned a piece of the Mets. It just got sold to my friend Steve Cohen. But I love—I love, I'm a sports enthusiast. I do love politics. I have to confess that. That’s something that bit me. And I love that policy discussion, and I love learning about it, and I love hanging out with my kids.

You know, that's me. Everyone else—my brother, my brother, Kevin, you haven’t met him—but my brother's a scratch golfer. This guy plays golf nine times a week. I don’t even know how he does it, you know?

But everybody should do whatever it is they like doing. And you set it up like a pizza pie. This piece is for saving, this is for work, that piece over there is for play. And you don’t want to do too much of any one thing because that's what makes it so interesting.

Well, thank you so much. And I can’t wait, Mooch, till we’re back doing what we used to do—having those great dinners in L.A. or New York. I mean that I miss more than anything. This pandemic is getting on my nerves, I have to admit.

By also, what I miss the most—I have to confess this, and everybody—the reason why people tune into you? You got the best sense of humor, man! You know how to laser focus in on the cheeky thing that’s going on right in the moment. And I miss hanging out with you. I hope to see you guys soon.

Well, listen, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been fantastic. And I just, you know, I look forward to that. This too will pass. We'll be out of this pandemic one day and I will see you soon. Take care, my friend! Thank you! God bless!