A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - Kevin O’Leary Is Lying

00:00:00.000 How are you offsetting these environmental concerns?

00:00:02.940 Well, I'm actually the only developer of data centers on Earth that graduated from environmental studies.

00:00:09.960 I think I'm the only guy doing this that graduated from environmental studies.

00:00:14.520 You talked about the environment. By the way, I'm a graduate in environmental studies, so I understand the issues.

00:00:19.500 I am going to show them these data centers.

00:00:21.680 They're going to be this shining example of how you do this sustainably, because I'm the only guy that has graduated out of environmental studies and builds data centers.

00:00:36.160 No one else on Earth has done that.

00:00:41.560 Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

00:00:50.400 I'm Matt Bernstein, and I would like to start by saying that neither Kevin O'Leary nor his wife, Linda, have ever killed anyone with their boat.

00:01:02.340 Anyway, I literally have to say it, this man is litigious.

00:01:05.380 Oh, good job protecting yourself legally, I gotta say. 1.00

00:01:08.640 Thank you, dear.

00:01:09.540 I knew I had to make this episode a few months ago when I watched a video of Nicki Minaj declaring that she was Donald Trump's biggest fan.

00:01:17.420 Um, I am probably the president's number one fan.

00:01:25.520 To her left, of course, stood Donald Trump.

00:01:28.480 But to her right stood Shark Tank panelist Mr. Wonderful,

00:01:33.200 a.k.a. Canadian scammer, I mean businessman, Kevin O'Leary.

00:01:37.420 What was Kevin doing on stage with the MAGA queen of rap and Trump himself?

00:01:42.040 I watched Shark Tank. I feel like we all had that phase.

00:01:44.700 I never particularly enjoyed Kevin's contributions to the show, but his meddling in right-wing U.S. politics seemed new to me. 0.56

00:01:54.020 Of course, that shock did not last, as Canadian Kevin, in short order, has become part of everything bad happening in America.

00:02:02.840 When Billie Eilish spoke out against ICE at the Grammys, Kevin went on Fox News the next day to tell her to, quote, 0.76

00:02:09.220 Shut your mouth and just entertain.

00:02:11.440 He told Pete Hegseth that student protesters for Palestine should abandon their cause lest future employers use AI to identify them through their masks. 0.94

00:02:22.080 And speaking of AI, he's currently at the helm of a burgeoning 40,000 acre data center in Utah, which will use more than double the power of the already drought stricken state, the entire state.

00:02:34.740 He was in Marty Supreme.

00:02:36.700 And of course, he wants young people to stop spending $28 on lunch.

00:02:42.940 Can't stand it when I see kids that are making $70,000 a year spending $28 for lunch. 1.00

00:02:48.480 I mean, that's just stupid. 0.99

00:02:50.220 We'll get to that. 1.00

00:02:51.080 Today, in service of my Utah listeners who are battling it out with this piece of shit, 1.00

00:02:56.460 and for the Canadians who have long dealt with their own, more pathetic version of Donald Trump, 1.00

00:03:00.960 we're diving deep into Kevin O'Leary. 0.55

00:03:04.740 his past his present and the two people he did not kill with his boat you guys got the great

00:03:12.280 canadian on a few weeks ago the incredible naomi klein and now you get the bad canadian how was

00:03:19.380 that for an intro emma vigeland welcome back to the show and i really think if i'm gonna put a

00:03:24.080 bad canadian at the top of my list it's hard to imagine o'leary wouldn't at the very least be in

00:03:30.020 the top three but hello matt bernstein as always good to see you my dear emma i'm so happy that

00:03:36.320 you're back i i hope i'm not like guilting you into doing this with me but and i told you this

00:03:42.220 privately uh i was out and about this past weekend memorial day weekend and i had multiple gay guys

00:03:48.480 come up to me and say that they listen to my podcast which thank you so much and that they

00:03:55.020 specifically loved when I do things with you. And I was like texting Emma every time this

00:04:00.360 happened to me. And I was like, just saying in case you want to come back, the gay guys really 1.00

00:04:03.860 like you. Well, I come on because one, I think you do phenomenal work and I love to be able to

00:04:12.860 contribute to it when I can. But also because I just adore spending time with you. And the more

00:04:19.120 that you do this kind of work, the more you realize that podcasting can also substitute

00:04:24.520 for social interaction. So since we're not hanging out this week, we might as well talk

00:04:29.740 about the Shark Tank dude.

00:04:32.060 Have you been following any of Kevin O'Leary's latest exploits before we get into his life?

00:04:37.280 I have. I have been following his lecturing of young people who have to spend more money

00:04:45.240 on lunch than he deems morally acceptable. And I've specifically been following the construction

00:04:52.120 of this AI data center, which is absolutely egregious and is resulting in a real grassroots

00:04:59.740 opposition to O'Leary's project, which is why he's been using some horrific tactics that I'm sure

00:05:06.720 we'll get into to go after the organizers in the state itself. The more that I learned about Kevin

00:05:12.580 O'Leary over the last week as I prepared for this, the more I realized that this is a good

00:05:18.560 episode to make because Kevin O'Leary, he's like a stand-in of every rich person and the lies that

00:05:27.220 they tell everyone else about how they became rich and also the lies about how they can become

00:05:33.440 rich. Like everything, everything he says is a lie. Everything he says is a lie. He is such a

00:05:38.820 scammer he's scammed continuously throughout his entire life he's rich because he's a scammer he is 0.96

00:05:44.960 not rich because of all of the things that he says he's rich for uh and he he can't be honest

00:05:50.280 about that because the truth of the matter is under capitalism there's not to like spoil my

00:05:56.280 thesis too quickly but there's only room for so many Kevin O'Leary's like we can't all be

00:06:02.940 successful scammers because then there's no one to scam which is why he has to make up a story

00:06:07.700 about how he's actually rich and how you could be rich too because you can't actually do what he

00:06:13.200 does because then there would be no room for him to do it. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I was

00:06:17.380 going to say that I think he really epitomizes the myth of the endless growth fantasy in capitalism

00:06:26.120 and AI data centers are a real really big part of that. The idea that there is endless profitability

00:06:32.920 and we only need these plucky entrepreneurs to come up with the right idea.

00:06:38.880 Tech currently has grown to a place where there's no longer any capacity for growth.

00:06:45.400 So they're pivoting to AI, these data centers that are destroying the environment and guzzling

00:06:50.580 up people's water.

00:06:51.900 And it's essentially a large scam.

00:06:54.620 And I think Kevin O'Leary, as a figurehead for that, in addition to the fact that he

00:07:00.060 marketed his services on television, much like our amazing president, Donald Trump,

00:07:05.980 that I think you can draw a lot of parallels and you can see a lot of society's sickness

00:07:11.500 through the eyes of this discount daddy war box.

00:07:15.740 Shall we get into his early life?

00:07:18.000 Let's.

00:07:18.600 Kevin O'Leary is born on July 9th, 1954 in Montreal.

00:07:24.500 all. His mother, Georgette, was a small business owner and investor. His dad died when he was

00:07:31.920 seven. Kevin calls Georgette the most influential person in his life and credits her with teaching

00:07:38.540 him how to invest. And here is where we start to get into very quickly some of the mythology

00:07:45.180 that Kevin O'Leary tells about himself. Because every person like this has a sort of mythos

00:07:51.620 that they just repeat over and over and over and over and over and over and over again in podcasts,

00:07:57.060 in interviews, in books. And this begins with the claim that Georgette, his mother,

00:08:03.660 invested a portion of every paycheck she ever earned into stocks. Now, there's variations on

00:08:09.920 this story. I found a Facebook post from him that said it was 10% of every paycheck,

00:08:15.360 a LinkedIn video from him where she said it was 15% of every paycheck.

00:08:19.720 She would take 15% of her salary and invest it.

00:08:26.500 And a tweet from him where he said it was 20% of every paycheck.

00:08:30.540 She took 20% of her paycheck each week and invested it.

00:08:34.560 Mother, she'd always invest a third of her paycheck.

00:08:36.680 I learned so much from my mother about how I conduct myself.

00:08:39.200 She said this to me, always tell the truth and you'll never have to remember what you said.

00:08:42.060 Now, there's obviously like some bullshitting clearly happening there, but the concept of

00:08:48.440 save a little bit of every paycheck you get is, I think, fine advice.

00:08:52.980 Like my parents have also always given me that advice.

00:08:56.160 Most of his financial advice, which we will get further into, stems from this, which again

00:09:00.100 isn't bad, but it also just relies on the assumption that people have 10 to 20 percent

00:09:06.020 of each paycheck available to save, which is just increasingly not the reality.

00:09:10.500 Not a lot of people anymore. We continuously hit records of credit card debt in this country. It dipped slightly last quarter, but prior to that, it was a record. We have incoming wealth inequality that is just absolutely staggering.

00:09:24.840 there have been analyses about how much money the 935 billionaires in the United States made in just

00:09:32.540 the last year. They now have a combined wealth total of over $8 trillion and we're at levels

00:09:39.900 of income and wealth inequality that exceed the Gilded Age. And so, yeah, it's a little bit

00:09:45.840 difficult for younger people to put away that amount of their paycheck when increasingly the

00:09:52.820 cost of living is getting worse and worse people are putting more and more on credit and you have

00:09:58.780 old guys like this lecturing to you about your individual choices when your choices are entirely

00:10:05.400 limited if not non-existent yeah we'll get into more of it but again it's just like so much of

00:10:12.440 his financial advice it reminds me a lot of like have you ever been on like landlord tiktok i don't

00:10:18.320 engage with TikTok. And I'm, as you know, a bit of an old woman at heart. So you're going to have

00:10:23.760 to educate me. I mean, I also don't go on a lot of TikTok except to look at these people who do

00:10:28.840 scams because I think it's fascinating. But there's a whole portion of TikTok that's people

00:10:33.420 encouraging other people to become landlords as a sort of get rich quick scheme. And the basis of

00:10:40.020 their advice always starts with like, just put 100,000 down on a building. And then they go on

00:10:46.280 from there but it's like wait a second how'd you get a hundred thousand dollars yes right and and

00:10:52.520 and and the self-help stuff from him that is just one thing i want to touch on really quickly

00:10:56.880 self-help for the most part is immensely right-wing coded because there's no collectivist

00:11:02.000 understanding that is embedded in the analysis yeah and it is rife with scammers because you

00:11:08.800 can convince a lot of individual atomized people that all they need to do is make the choices that

00:11:14.140 his mommy made or you got to just cut down on your sweet green or whatever. And you'll be rich

00:11:20.260 just like me. But as we're going to be getting into in this podcast, to be just like Kevin O'Leary

00:11:27.320 would mean to abandon a lot of moral principles and to be one of the luckiest people over the

00:11:33.280 past how many decades? His mythology goes further. When I announced that I was thinking about making

00:11:39.680 this episode i got a message from a canadian listener and they were like please talk about

00:11:45.340 the ice cream shop story do you know the ice cream shop story i do not there were a few things that i

00:11:52.440 chose not to read through in the outline because this just seemed too delicious no pun intended

00:11:58.660 for me to eat alone. 1.00

00:12:03.180 Stupid. 1.00

00:12:03.740 So dumb. 1.00

00:12:07.220 Okay, Kevin O'Leary has this origin story 1.00

00:12:11.640 that he has told over and over and over and over

00:12:15.060 and over and over and over and over again.

00:12:16.820 It's about something that happened when he worked

00:12:18.760 for one day at an ice cream shop in high school.

00:12:23.000 Every entrepreneur I've ever talked to

00:12:24.620 that finds himself where I am today

00:12:26.740 has has a defining moment where they are pushed into this path it's something

00:12:32.200 they can remember and they remember it in perpetuity and I'll remember my moment

00:12:35.740 getting fired in an ice cream store that's simple first day on the job asked

00:12:41.500 to serve and scoop ice cream and I did that all day but when people sample ice

00:12:48.280 cream they get a taster and they take their gum out and they throw it on the

00:12:51.520 floor somebody's got a scripted gum off the floor at the end of the day I only

00:12:56.320 took that job because i was very interested in a girl who was working in the shoe store and i figured 1.00

00:13:01.360 i could you know hang out with her afterwards and i saw her waiting for me and the woman who owned

00:13:07.840 the store said you've got a script to come off the floor and i didn't want her to see me on my knees

00:13:13.760 with a scraper bad for my brand i was in high school and uh she said no no you have to do it

00:13:20.800 And I said, you know, you hired me as a scooper, not a scraper.

00:13:23.800 She said, how about you're fired?

00:13:27.020 And I didn't know what that meant.

00:13:28.740 And it was the defining moment for me because I realized there's two kinds of people in the world. 0.99

00:13:33.180 There's people that own the store and there's people that scrape the shit off the floor. 0.98

00:13:38.440 And you have to decide who you are. 0.99

00:13:39.980 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:13:41.140 Hold on.

00:13:42.000 That was the lesson that he took from that story?

00:13:44.400 That was the lesson that he took from that story.

00:13:46.380 That there's two types of people in the world.

00:13:48.460 there's people who own the store 0.99

00:13:50.660 and people who scrape the shit off the floor there's two types of people in the world 0.98

00:13:55.440 those that own the store and those that scrape the off the floor there are people who own the 0.99

00:14:00.740 store and there are people who scrape the off the floor so i learned that day that there are two

00:14:05.520 types of people out there there's people that scrape the off the floor and there's a people

00:14:11.540 that own the store i want to be the guy that owned the store no i dig that okay so instead of having

00:14:16.840 empathy for workers he realized huh this is a hierarchy and I want to get on the other side

00:14:26.040 of the hierarchy so I can be directing people to scrape stuff off the floor and not be humiliated

00:14:33.240 in front of this girl that I like for having to do such degrading work first of all I have 1.00

00:14:39.740 worked in an ice cream store. I worked at it in my hometown one summer. And there is not a large

00:14:47.080 staff typically at ice cream stores. You're scooping ice cream and you're also scraping

00:14:53.360 shit off the floor when the doors close and when it's time for closing. I'm not sure exactly what 0.94

00:15:00.400 differentiation he's making there, but I guess his stratification is the business owner and then the

00:15:07.280 the scraper. There's no in between, according to him. Well, so I have a couple clarifying

00:15:12.320 questions here that actually aren't about the moral of the story. Quick interlude. First of

00:15:16.400 all, to any Canadian listeners, is it typically pronounced ice cream? Because in every version

00:15:21.780 of this that he tells, he always says, I was hired to scoop ice cream. I was working in an

00:15:26.640 ice cream store. And so I got a job as a scooper, scooping ice cream. First day on the job,

00:15:32.600 asked to serve and scoop ice cream it was my second day working there and the owner had hired

00:15:37.860 me to scoop ice cream ice cream i mean if he's screaming for ice cream that would make sense but

00:15:43.160 ice cream ice cream for ice cream i don't know place the emphasis on the wrong syllable kevin

00:15:48.820 but then the other question that i had and this i could just be in the dark about this but

00:15:56.100 he always tells the story and he's like it was common for everyone who ordered a sample to spit

00:16:03.400 their gum on the floor is that something that happens a lot um i don't know was he in some sort

00:16:10.340 of bar at 2 a.m was everyone just really horrible at this specific ice cream store i mean i don't

00:16:16.380 doubt that he was asked to scrape gum off the floor but he he did make it sound like this was 0.95

00:16:20.680 happening frequently enough for there should have been like someone hired to just scrape shit off 0.98

00:16:26.740 the floor. And I said to the owner of the store, you hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. You 0.98

00:16:31.720 hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. And I said, no, you hired me as an ice cream scooper,

00:16:37.080 not a scraper. Well, it sounds like he's trying to overemphasize the degrading nature of wage work

00:16:42.900 and speak about being a business owner as the privileged position that it is. Now he's

00:16:48.240 fetishizing it and he's reifying horrible hierarchies that have put us in the position

00:16:53.040 of, as I mentioned, untold incoming wealth inequality.

00:16:55.300 But it's a way for him to, I guess, reify the class differences that he so wanted to

00:17:02.940 exacerbate, but just be on the other side of.

00:17:06.240 It's incredible to tell that story and the defining feature of it be, I chose to abandon

00:17:13.420 in any empathy that was right in front of my face and proceed to be like, no, I just want to be the

00:17:19.720 person doing this to other people. I know I know the term spiritually Israeli is very overused 0.83

00:17:26.120 online, but there really is something spiritually Israeli about this to me. Israel is, of course,

00:17:32.080 founded on and upheld by exploiting the trauma of the Holocaust and the belief that Jews need 0.99

00:17:38.200 this like highly fortified, armed, lethal ethnostates that we can dominate rather than 0.93

00:17:43.820 be dominated. Zionists view this dynamic that you're either an oppressor or oppressed as like

00:17:50.520 the natural and unchangeable order of things. And I think what Kevin O'Leary is describing

00:17:55.040 is like the same thing. He's like, you're either scraping shit off the floor in humiliation with 0.99

00:18:01.700 like horrible working conditions and an abusive boss, or you are the abusive boss. So I set out 0.99

00:18:06.500 to the to be the abusive boss and the comments on these videos are always just like inspiring

00:18:11.280 yes i know that could be me too i'm definitely not a sheep and it's not going to work out for

00:18:17.720 you that's the part about the self-help scamming element which is you were kind of touching on who

00:18:23.280 is this appealing to as he speaks in these terms it's to people who have already made it who want

00:18:29.420 to have almost like visual and emotional evidence that they are in the superior class and that

00:18:37.200 everybody that was unable to achieve what they have achieved, like the great Kevin O'Leary,

00:18:42.800 has made choices and made decisions that make them inferior to Kevin O'Leary.

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00:20:39.640 let's get back to the show. Shall we talk about some of the amazing decisions that Kevin O'Leary

00:20:46.580 makes to accrue his very ethical wealth? I would like to. As it goes, Kevin O'Leary initially wants

00:20:52.640 to be a photographer, which I also started my career wanting to be a photographer. People

00:20:58.520 didn't know that. Building bridges between Kevin and I. But his father, like many fathers,

00:21:04.600 told him basically to get real. So he decides to go into business, take his passion for investing,

00:21:11.740 at least the one that he claims to have had as a result of his mother, Kevin gets a bachelor's

00:21:17.540 degree in environmental studies, something he would disregard completely later on in his career.

00:21:23.140 And then he got his master's at business school. While at business school, he had an internship at

00:21:29.800 Nabisco, the cookie company. He briefly works in TV production and helps co-found Special Event

00:21:36.260 Television, a sports programming network, which he later sells his share of for $25,000.

00:21:42.900 In 1986, and this is where things really get going, so I'm going to need everyone to lock in.

00:21:49.040 Sorry, I sound like a, I don't know, I sound like a TikTok. I'm like, lock in. I don't know,

00:21:52.960 trying too hard. You got way too straight there. Lock in, bro. In 1986, Kevin O'Leary starts

00:21:59.640 Softkey, which is a computer software company, which becomes the catalyst for his success.

00:22:06.260 The way Kevin O'Leary tells it is like, I was just living in my mom's basement and I started

00:22:12.220 this company that I ended up selling for $4 billion. Did you know Kevin O'Leary built a

00:22:18.100 $3.7 billion empire from his basement using a simple three-step formula? And he uses this

00:22:24.560 story, of course, to prop himself up into venture capital royalty, Shark Tank, Dragon's Den,

00:22:30.660 becomes a TV personality. He's written three books based off of it called Cold Hard Truth

00:22:35.500 on business, money, and life, the cold hard truth on men, women, and money, and the cold hard truth

00:22:41.660 on family, kids, and money. Can we pause there for just a quick second to take a look at these

00:22:47.060 titles? I mean, if you're buying this book, you're a sucker at this point. I mean, the way that it 0.99

00:22:53.720 looks, it looks like a scam. And I'm not trying to disparage anybody that's trying to make their

00:22:59.860 way in the world but man this is like the bus stop ads for lawyers but just in book form this

00:23:08.500 guy's a self-marketer that's his greatest skill where have we heard that before yes exactly and

00:23:14.000 if he was just like if he was just rich because he was so good at business he wouldn't have to be

00:23:21.200 also like writing a book series and doing multiple television shows and on the news every day like

00:23:30.380 so much of kevin o'leary's wealth comes from propagating his image of a wealthy person yes

00:23:37.620 like he kevin o'leary has never been a billionaire but he wants everyone to think that he's a

00:23:42.080 you know what i mean yes and the fact that two of those titles include family slash women like

00:23:48.620 You see a lot of this in the self-help space, even online now with some of the Manosphere influencers, where a lot of times under capitalism, masculinity and financial success are conflated.

00:24:02.560 And so if you want to bring people into your financial schemes or scams and that's your brand, you might as well tap into the anxiety that a lot of men feel about their masculinity and connect it with their ability to exist under capitalism.

00:24:20.820 A lot of this is like masculine oriented Mel Robbins. Yes. Like, I'm sorry. I know some of you probably like Mel Robbins, but like, I really don't. Yeah. And she's such a scammer. In many ways, she's Kevin O'Leary for women. And if you want an episode about that, I don't know.

00:24:40.580 Well, maybe another time. But like, I just got to say, from somebody that grew up in a non-denominational Christian household, it sounds a lot like some of the evangelical preachers that would be on TV just in the background.

00:24:53.880 uh my family was not religious but i know that there are a lot of christians in this country

00:24:58.680 that listen to those kinds of people and it should not be a shock to you that trump is essentially a

00:25:04.120 prosperity gospel idol in that he is the kind of person that takes the place of religious idolatry

00:25:12.360 and he did that by presenting himself as a capitalistic deity to an audience that was

00:25:19.640 already primed to worship both wealth and power they're sheep and that's the same audience that

00:25:25.660 uh o'leary is after not to be too disparaging but i mean come on baby it's like yes and no i try to

00:25:32.480 keep the blame on these figures because ultimately like they're just propagating the system that

00:25:38.520 turns these consumers into sheep like they're just so desperate i know they're so desperate

00:25:44.440 i know i don't know no you're right and you sound like me like two or three years ago when i spent

00:25:49.600 a little less time with sam but keep going anyway this story about kevin o'leary building softkey

00:25:58.140 the software company in his mom's basement and then selling it a few years later for four billion

00:26:02.700 dollars is technically a true story but contains my dear so very many holes the first being that

00:26:11.320 he started that company with a ten thousand dollar investment from can you guess who

00:26:16.520 um his mom his mom how did you know because it's the most self-aggrandizing way that he could

00:26:27.860 potentially describe his origin story and that's when the tie goes to the runner the tie goes to

00:26:33.700 the braggart he recently made a video on instagram i'm going to try to find it because i was scrolling

00:26:37.840 through his instagram this morning but he was like the fastest way to make a million dollars

00:26:42.680 your first million dollars is to make your first ten thousand dollars the fastest way to make a

00:26:47.400 million dollars is to make the first ten thousand and i was thinking man great wouldn't it also be

00:26:53.060 nice if you had a mom that gave that to you right i love that make it by having a mom that loves you 0.98

00:27:00.120 like unlike you you pathetic poor person it reminds me so much there's this meme it's this 0.97

00:27:06.240 person made up of all these puzzle pieces and there's just one missing it's captioned like 0.99

00:27:10.340 sometimes what a person needs is just the one missing piece. And then off in the distance,

00:27:15.220 the puzzle piece is just labeled generational wealth. That's the one piece that you're missing.

00:27:20.640 That's exactly right. Anyway, SoftKey begins focusing on educational software. And by 1993,

00:27:29.320 seven years after its founding, is a publicly traded company with revenues of $110 million,

00:27:36.400 dollars, but is operating nonetheless at a loss of $57 million. Softkey went on to acquire other

00:27:46.180 educational technology companies, two of which, by the way, were called by Dartmouth's Tucker

00:27:51.700 School of Business, quote, two of the 10 worst U.S. acquisitions during 1994 to 1996 as measured

00:27:57.820 by shareholder value. It was a lot of like shady and bad business, which came to its head after

00:28:03.500 Softkey put in a bid for a San Francisco-based company called The Learning Company, or TLC,

00:28:09.760 not to be confused with the television network. TLC, in the process of being acquired by Softkey,

00:28:16.640 hired a forensic accounting firm to investigate Softkey's financial health. And the firm found

00:28:22.500 that Softkey may have overstated its earnings by bundling various general and administrative costs

00:28:28.820 into its write-offs. In any case, Softkey's acquisition of TLC went through and Softkey

00:28:35.460 adopted the TLC name. So Kevin O'Leary's big company at this point is called TLC now.

00:28:41.760 TLC continues to grow and its revenues reach $800 million. But is it making a profit?

00:28:48.800 I would guess that it's not. And I have some thoughts in general about educational software

00:28:55.860 that I'll jump into after you're done.

00:28:58.240 So this is a quote from a 2012 article called Kevin O'Leary.

00:29:02.220 He's not a billionaire.

00:29:03.440 He just plays one on TV, written in Globe and Mail Canada.

00:29:06.820 It's a very good long-form article that you should go and read

00:29:09.000 if you're curious about what happened with this business.

00:29:11.460 While O'Leary says in his memoir, Cold Hard Truth,

00:29:14.220 that TLC was a money-making machine,

00:29:17.440 an SEC filing shows that TLC suffered net losses of

00:29:21.180 $376 million in 1996, $495 million in 1997, and $105 million in 1998.

00:29:34.160 TLC's accumulated deficit topped $1.1 billion by the end of 1998.

00:29:40.980 I mean, how can you not respect that business acumen there, Matt?

00:29:47.700 Don't you love capitalism and how fair it is?

00:29:51.180 Do you want to put in your two cents about educational software before I tell you what happens?

00:29:54.700 I mean, sure. Like, I don't know the specifics of the educational software and of the company that he ran, but this was a real part, the 90s and the early 2000s of wealthy people, Bill Gates notably, coming in and saying that a lot of educational policy should be outsourced in a way that benefits technology companies and the emerging tech sector and the dot

00:30:21.160 com bubble that I know that Kevin O'Leary was very much a part of, at the very least in Bill

00:30:26.940 Gates's case, he did a complete takeover of education in many parts of the country. And

00:30:32.440 there has been an analysis of that takeover and that privatization showing that learning standards

00:30:38.760 went down and that really it turns out teachers knew best. And it was more important to have

00:30:44.780 things like, you know, adaptive learning and educational policy that was more tailored to

00:30:49.500 the students as opposed to this push that like technology has to be involved. It seems like

00:30:54.980 O'Leary rode that wave, but it really was a wave of privatizing education. And it was bipartisan,

00:31:01.920 unfortunately, that is hopefully no longer in vogue. But, you know, you have existing politicians

00:31:07.400 in the Democratic Party right now that still were very much a part of that push. I think

00:31:12.760 Cory Booker comes to mind from New Jersey. This was a giant scam in and of itself. And it looks

00:31:18.240 like O'Leary's participation in the broader scam was a scam within the scam, a Russian doll,

00:31:25.200 if you will. Yes. And by the way, and I'm just going to say really quick, everything that I'm

00:31:30.080 saying is alleged because, well, it's alleged. However, you might be wondering, like, how can

00:31:37.680 you have like revenues of $800 million with a software company and still be losing so much

00:31:42.940 money. And one of the things that was eventually uncovered was that TLC, Kevin O'Leary's company,

00:31:51.260 it would at the end of a quarter to at the end of a financial quarter to really boost its revenue

00:31:56.040 numbers up, it would repackage a lot of unsold merchandise and send it out to be sold in drug

00:32:02.300 stores and would mark those sales as revenue. But then after the quarter came to a close and

00:32:08.780 they had reported it as revenue, a lot of that merchandise ended up getting returned because no

00:32:12.880 was buying it. Yes, it was the dot com bubble time and they were buying anything that would

00:32:18.220 come in front of them that had some sort of shiny tech branding associated with it. So

00:32:23.900 O'Leary is a scammer, it appears, but it also appears like the purchaser did not do their due

00:32:28.800 diligence. Once again, the myth of meritocracy under capitalism just exploding before our very

00:32:35.820 eyes. Speaking of purchasers not doing their doodil... In 1998, Mattel, the toy company,

00:32:44.180 put in a bid to acquire TLC, believing that educational software was the future.

00:32:51.120 Mattel purchased TLC for about $4 billion in the spring of 1999. O'Leary took over as president

00:33:00.580 of Mattel's new TLC digital division. His salary increased to $650,000 a year and his severance

00:33:09.060 package grew to $5.2 million. A few months after the sale went through, O'Leary sold almost all

00:33:19.100 of his stock in the company and made immediately around $6 million. And if you think this sounds

00:33:26.060 a lot like insider trading. I can't say whether or not you're right, but you can think what you

00:33:31.600 want. Coincidences happen every day. Coincidence happens every day. It's all alleged, Kevin.

00:33:36.900 In the third quarter of 1999, Mattel initially announced that it expected a 50 million profit

00:33:43.580 from TLC. Upon realizing the company they acquired was actually collapsing, they revised that estimate

00:33:50.240 to a loss of between $50 and $100 million, which wiped out $2 billion of shareholder value in one

00:33:58.520 day. The actual Q3 loss ended up being $105 million, and the following quarter, the loss

00:34:06.120 was $206 million. That November of 1999, Mattel fired Kevin O'Leary six months into a three-year

00:34:15.280 contract. And finally, in 2000, one year after the acquisition went through, they sold it for around

00:34:23.620 $27 million. Businessweek called Mattel's purchase of TLC one of the worst deals of all time.

00:34:30.920 Mattel shareholders launched a class action lawsuit accusing Kevin O'Leary of insider trading

00:34:36.060 and obscuring the actual health of TLC, which Mattel eventually settled by paying out $122

00:34:42.540 million to shareholders. But in the end, didn't really matter for Kevin. He made roughly $11

00:34:48.860 million between his severance package and the sale of his Mattel stock. So essentially, he took a

00:34:57.600 pile of crap, put a bow on it, sold it to Mattel, got out when he could, left the rest of the 0.99

00:35:05.760 shareholders with the bag, as well as the purchaser of his software, and then has decided 0.99

00:35:12.000 to market himself as a business genius. Now, that's not necessarily too far afield from the

00:35:19.420 truth. Everything under capitalism, I would argue, requires some level of scamming. I mean,

00:35:26.420 the fact that workers don't own the means of production for the products that they produce

00:35:31.260 and put their labor into is a scam in and of itself. At least there should be some sort of

00:35:37.100 hybrid model where workers have a part of the company in a way that isn't so disproportionately

00:35:44.640 oriented, I think, also towards financialization and towards that being stock options. It's about

00:35:50.240 like the physical product that's being produced. But I digress. He is a scammer, allegedly. It

00:35:57.220 appears like he is now selling that as something that other people should replicate. And the

00:36:02.280 reality is that this dot-com bubble this period where all of this kind of software was being

00:36:07.760 purchased was really the result of a lot of luck and it doesn't seem like his product was very good

00:36:13.500 he just rode the wave of the dot-com bubble cashed out and kind of left everybody to be screwed over

00:36:20.600 and that's not replicable especially because he only was able to start this with ten thousand 0.97

00:36:25.920 fucking dollars from his mom exactly his rich mom i mean look i grew up with a certain amount 0.97

00:36:31.640 the privilege with parents that are both lawyers, it gave me a head start in life. It allowed me to 0.99

00:36:36.440 not have student debt, which so many of my friends and family members have to deal with.

00:36:42.020 It allowed me to live at home for a year when I was making a very low wage when I first got my

00:36:48.020 media career start at TYT. And so I was able to save up to get an apartment. You can acknowledge

00:36:53.640 those things and still say, hey, I'm lucky to be in the position that I'm in. And yet guys like

00:36:59.940 Kevin O'Leary do the exact opposite. They create media ecosystems that are supposedly about

00:37:06.080 empowering other people when in reality it's creating a misperception that this level of

00:37:14.040 wealth is achievable if you just put your mind to it. That's right. The fact that he's even like

00:37:19.420 a shark tank guy where like nothing, as you say, nothing that he did to actually accrue his wealth

00:37:26.060 is replicable, least of all, through a sort of like organic, thoughtful entrepreneurship.

00:37:32.980 And speaking of which, I want to, I was going to save this for later, but there's a video that I

00:37:37.060 found on his Instagram that I saved, and I want to show you it. This is actually the one where he's

00:37:41.080 talking about the fastest way to make a million dollars.

00:37:43.260 The fastest way to make a million dollars is to make the first 10,000. That's really how it works.

00:37:48.700 But really, it's not about anything else except focusing on what people want and how to solve

00:37:55.300 solve their problems. People get wealthy, not pursuing money out of greed, but pursuing a

00:38:02.500 passion around a problem-solving exercise. That's what business is all about. People don't want to

00:38:08.240 walk around with bare feet, so they buy shoes. It's a simple outcome, isn't it? So think about

00:38:13.100 that. Try and find something that's a pain point that you know everybody has, and then provide a

00:38:19.100 product or service that solves for that. That's how you make a million. That's how you make five

00:38:23.140 million that's how you make a hundred million that's how you make a billion people don't like

00:38:26.500 walking around barefoot just invent shoes that was simple did he say a pain point at the end a pain

00:38:32.240 point yeah just interesting his support for donald trump his support for capitalism that is unfettered

00:38:38.260 there are a lot of things that are pain points for people having a home or not having a home

00:38:42.920 being able to have a roof over your head that's a point of pain should that be exploited by the

00:38:48.420 market? Your ability to pay for your cancer treatment, that's a point of real pain. Should

00:38:53.360 that be exploited by the market? These are the questions that should be asked of somebody who

00:38:57.960 espouses this ideology. It's also, I mean, I don't want to belabor the point too much, but like

00:39:03.320 finding a hole in the market, which is what all of these like entrepreneur influencers say is like

00:39:09.620 the first thing that you have to do, which like Kevin O'Leary is ultimately like an influencer.

00:39:14.020 Again, it just bears repeating over and over again as many times as he repeats the lies.

00:39:18.420 that he is lying.

00:39:20.080 He didn't become rich by finding a hole in the market.

00:39:23.380 There wasn't a hole in the market

00:39:24.760 for the thing that he created.

00:39:26.220 So he inflated the worth of the company,

00:39:29.620 sold it for a million dollars,

00:39:31.460 well, actually $4 billion,

00:39:33.100 made out like a bandit,

00:39:34.400 and then had everyone else sort of cover up the mess.

00:39:37.480 Like, it's just a lie.

00:39:38.280 And this is why I think this episode is good,

00:39:40.480 because that is the case

00:39:41.800 for basically everyone who is that rich.

00:39:43.980 I know people are going to take issue with that

00:39:45.300 and find like, oh, no,

00:39:46.480 I know the guy who invented the granola bar.

00:39:48.120 OK, congratulations. But you can't become a billionaire. And I'm not even accusing Kevin O'Leary of being a billionaire. I know that would flatter him way too much. But you can't become that wealthy without exploiting people.

00:40:02.320 I've said this before. It doesn't necessarily matter if sociopathy is a prerequisite for achieving that level of wealth or if you develop a sociopathy because you are so inculcated from the human experience once you develop that level of wealth.

00:40:20.440 it's a chicken or the egg situation the end result is uh largely immaterial it means that we should

00:40:29.320 not allow people to accrue this kind of wealth and we should be able to tax the hell out of them if

00:40:34.880 they get to that point because that level of wealth inherently involves exploitation regardless

00:40:41.680 of the intentions from the outset which i don't believe but if you want to take them in the best

00:40:46.980 faith interpretation. It doesn't matter. We're not talking about your moral character. We're

00:40:51.820 talking about how we structure a society. And no person should have that level of wealth because

00:40:57.840 of the amount of power that it gives to them. It's undemocratic, in addition to being exploitative

00:41:03.720 just from an economic sense. Kevin, now with his 10 plus million dollars, goes on to become an

00:41:11.440 investor. He becomes a venture capitalist. He invests in some things that work and he invests

00:41:16.060 some things that don't work. But at this point, he has kind of so much money that the money itself

00:41:21.120 just sort of like compounds. In 2003, he clearly wanting to be some sort of influencer, which I

00:41:28.920 think in common with Donald Trump and a lot of these other figures, he's always wanted to be on

00:41:33.120 TV. He reaches out directly to a Canadian television producer. He's like, I think I would

00:41:39.580 be great on TV. Props to Kevin, a cold call. And he gets on TV. He's first on this show called

00:41:46.040 squeeze play, but then he really comes into the limelight, at least in Canada, after being cast

00:41:52.020 on Dragon's Den, a TV show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business to a panel

00:41:59.780 of venture capitalists. This show is, of course, adapted for the US as Shark Tank in 2009,

00:42:06.740 which O'Leary was brought onto. Producers have always liked the way that he can play an asshole 0.99

00:42:12.120 on TV and seemingly off of TV as well. This isn't really an episode about Shark Tank. 0.98

00:42:17.820 I don't have that much to say about Shark Tank. I had a phase watching Shark Tank. I feel like

00:42:23.020 probably most people have had some phase where they're like, it's 10pm and I'm on a weeknight

00:42:29.100 and I'm eating microwavable mac and cheese on the couch and like Shark Tank's on so I'm gonna

00:42:33.660 watch 16 episodes of Shark Tank. You know, I enjoyed it. It's fine. I think I initially

00:42:39.620 watched it to support bethany frankel who was girl boss capitalizing and capitalisming and at

00:42:45.940 the time i was obsessed with her i look back on that obsession differently god if we could do a

00:42:52.400 housewives episode i don't know i don't know what i would do with myself what happened with bethany

00:42:56.420 frankel i'm not really a housewives person i mean there's nothing really to say it's just that like

00:43:00.380 i've grown out of thinking the girl boss like feminism thing and her also kind of ridiculous

00:43:07.160 self mythologizing uh is anything of value but god to her seasons of real housewives of new york

00:43:14.400 still hit season seven through 11 baby it's the literal peak of television i'm taking us too far

00:43:20.620 afield this is why the gay men love you that's good to hear no i mean i had a phase with shark

00:43:25.020 tank like it was entertaining i think eventually it started to feel like a little gross whatever 0.97

00:43:30.580 you could say like i'm being too woke about it because this is how like investing works and like

00:43:34.120 you do have to pitch your ideas to rich people but like i think at a certain point especially

00:43:39.280 as like the world reaches like where we are today with wealth inequality with like basic health and

00:43:44.980 human services not being available to people watching this sort of like monopoly man panel

00:43:51.200 and and watching like oftentimes poor people just like beg and then be brutalized by someone like

00:43:58.120 kevin o'leary on tv to me it just started to feel like icky i guess it really fit in as we're going

00:44:04.220 to draw a lot of parallels to donald trump in with the apprentice as a early 2000s reality show

00:44:12.600 that was about a wealthy boss who understood things whether it's a panel of capitalists

00:44:19.540 on shark tank or trump and his family himself uh that performed this for television and it allowed

00:44:28.980 people who didn't have economic circumstances that have empowered them to visualize themselves

00:44:35.980 in the role of the boss or the person that's deciding whether or not this pitch for the shark

00:44:42.500 Tank panel is something that is viable. It's entertainment that places you in the power

00:44:49.880 position when our economy has so thoroughly disempowered those people. Every person that

00:44:55.900 comes onto Shark Tank has infinitely more in common with the rest of us than we do with the

00:45:02.340 0.01% that would be making determinations based on investment. And yet what this television

00:45:09.240 programming has given to people is the vicarious experience of living in the position of being the

00:45:16.380 boss in a time when that's been so thoroughly stolen from them that is the best analysis of

00:45:23.860 shark tank i've ever heard thank you so much in fairness i haven't heard that many analyses of

00:45:28.980 shark tank but that was a really good should i start a video essay channel i mean honestly that's

00:45:35.060 like a a dream of mine that i've never really been able to achieve but those video essays gosh i mean

00:45:42.620 you know with all your editing and stuff like that it's tough i was gonna say we're halfway there

00:45:46.360 with a bit fruity i i really hate that show at this point because even like the nice one

00:45:50.580 is mark cuban and like i can't even stand mark cuban anymore mark cuban just sold the dallas

00:45:56.280 mavericks which he said was like his greatest love in life to miriam adelson wow if people

00:46:04.160 don't know who Miriam Adelson is. Trump's one of his top donors, mega Zionist donor. Her husband,

00:46:09.900 Sheldon Adelson, has died, but he funded a right wing paper in Israel. She continues to support it.

00:46:16.500 She wants the entire West Bank essentially annexed by the state of Israel and did a quid pro quo with 0.78

00:46:21.980 Trump to allow for that to happen. She donated $100 million to his last reelection effort. So

00:46:28.100 So unfortunately, yes, Mark Cuban, who I have met in person before and is a very firm handshake, is not one of the good billionaires because those don't exist. 0.99

00:46:39.520 There you fucking go. 0.80

00:46:41.360 I want to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to the American Humanist Association for supporting this episode. 0.99

00:46:50.000 I was so grateful that the American Humanist Association continues to want to work with this show.

00:46:57.220 because their value system is so organically aligned with my own. Humanism is fundamentally

00:47:04.460 about living ethically. It's about living in community with other people who you care about,

00:47:09.380 and it is about valuing evidence over dogma, valuing science over religion, and creating

00:47:16.920 legislation that prioritizes that as an ethic. The American Humanist Association is an organization

00:47:23.480 that works to materially protect us from laws that value religion over people. And if that's

00:47:30.660 a battle that resonates with you, I would love for you to check them out at humanist.org

00:47:36.620 slash fruity. You can learn more about what they're up to. And if you feel so inclined and

00:47:42.500 able, you can make a donation. No donation, of course, is too small. And you'd be shocked at

00:47:48.360 what five dollars can do. When you send five dollars to the AHA, you are directly funding

00:47:54.660 legal work that protects our right to live under a government that doesn't use religion when it

00:48:00.880 makes laws. You're funding policy work that helps strike down bills that would otherwise target

00:48:06.580 marginalized communities. And this is work that Lord knows we need it right now. So big shout out

00:48:13.240 to the AHA. Thank you for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the show.

00:48:19.880 I want to take a beat and talk about some of Kevin O'Leary's personal finance advice. And I want to

00:48:27.700 start with one clip that has made the rounds recently and that I mentioned up top. Let's

00:48:33.560 listen to it. Can't stand it when I see kids that are making 70 grand a year spending $28 for lunch.

00:48:40.000 I mean, that's just stupid. It's just think about that in the context of that being put into an 0.98

00:48:45.380 index and making eight to ten percent a year for the next 50 years. Emma, why would you eat lunch?

00:48:51.700 Why would you eat lunch when you could invest that lunch money? Skinny. All right. Yeah. First

00:48:57.460 of all, not a ton of body positivity from Kevin O'Leary there. We're doing the avocado toast

00:49:03.780 thing, I guess. That's right. I mean, come on. We've grown up with this at this point. Yeah.

00:49:08.520 it's not a problem that food prices are so insane and that wages have fallen below the pace of

00:49:16.100 inflation. And by the way, you have an administration that O'Leary supports that's

00:49:20.660 telling you that you have to control your health through your individual consumption choices.

00:49:26.640 And that's the only thing we're offering to you is some advice about, I don't know,

00:49:30.160 seed oil and the amount of meat and vegetables that you should consume. Make that decision

00:49:34.740 yourself, but also make sure that you skip lunch and get the hot dog from the vendor that's a few

00:49:40.020 bucks or get the Big Mac as opposed to the salad that we're telling you that you need to eat to

00:49:45.820 make yourself healthy, but also don't eat it because if you do so, it's your problem for not

00:49:51.920 making smart and financial investments. Thank you to the boomer class and the capitalist class for 0.87

00:49:57.480 giving us such sage advice. Can you explain like because a lot of people listening are probably

00:50:02.740 either like too old or too young to know what i'm calling is the millennial avocado toast fallacy

00:50:09.020 yes i grew up with it a little you're a few years older than me so you definitely were like in the

00:50:13.220 heart of that all right sorry you're you're actually my we're the same age i'm 19 um yeah

00:50:19.260 because this is the millennial avocado toast fallacy just recycled for gen z wait so you're

00:50:26.280 like at the beginning of gen z right i'm at the end of millennial i think that's how it works

00:50:30.620 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm right on the cusp. I'm 98. So I don't know, people can put me where they want.

00:50:34.480 My sister's 97. And I think about her as on the cusp as well. But I'm towards the end of the millennial experience, just to clarify that for the audience, obviously important stuff. But like, this was a kind of an Obama era fixation on conservative media that spread into the mainstream, which was like, can all of you kids that are coming out of college in the financial crash, and there are no opportunities for you, just shut the hell up.

00:50:59.960 and stop spending all of this money on avocado toast which by the way at the time it was like

00:51:05.440 eleven dollars oh my god now it's like sixteen dollars for an avocado well this is the thing

00:51:11.060 it's like it's the same fallacy but with the number pumped up to 28 because like that's how

00:51:15.900 much lunch is now well i mean one again if we want to bring it back to the trump administration

00:51:21.640 does o'leary want to talk to him about the fact that he started this offensive criminal war with

00:51:26.280 Iran that has driven up fertilizer prices to the point where everybody's food is going to continue

00:51:31.940 to go up. It doesn't matter what part of the world that you're in. There's a disproportionate 0.68

00:51:36.260 amount of fertilizer that is made from byproducts that come from oil and gas. And that a large

00:51:42.380 portion of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz. So it's not just going to be your gas prices that

00:51:47.240 go up. It's your food prices, too. And O'Leary is trying to say, and this is where, you know,

00:51:52.240 conservatives you can put a pin in their arguments or you can flag them when you see how they're

00:51:57.460 trying to disempower you politically because that's what he's trying to do don't look at the

00:52:02.020 systemic reasons don't look at capitalism don't look at all the tax cuts to the wealthy that have

00:52:07.240 occurred for decades the regulatory framework that reagan and the conservatives have gutted

00:52:12.540 for decades don't look at the fact that we've taken the chains off of corporations they can

00:52:18.440 charge you whatever you want. Make it about your individual consumption choices. And that makes

00:52:26.020 people look less collectively and turn inwardly. And so for all the talk on the right about these

00:52:32.580 mental health issues and why do young men feel disempowered by society? I don't know. Maybe

00:52:38.340 because the entire crop of influencers that are telling them how to be a man or how to make money

00:52:44.180 in this society are specifically skirting the systemic issues that have led to their

00:52:50.940 immiseration and are more focused on blaming individuals for their circumstances because

00:52:56.920 this is not the actual audience, right?

00:53:00.160 Like, I just want people to be clear about that.

00:53:02.200 From the avocado toast phenomenon on Fox News that spread elsewhere to this talking

00:53:06.880 point from Kevin O'Leary, this is about being a bedtime story for grandpa watching Fox News.

00:53:12.900 That's right.

00:53:13.140 this is about him being pissed that his non-binary granddaughter talks back to him

00:53:18.860 at thanksgiving or non-binary uh what you you get what i'm saying grandchild you know non-binary 0.73

00:53:25.480 granddaughter it's a bedtime story for already existing rich old white men and the self-help

00:53:31.900 stuff is a very thin veneer but the people that do get dragged into it i feel for them because

00:53:38.340 they're being misled and they're not necessarily seeing what their power is and and it's a it's

00:53:43.880 a self-soothing story for kevin o'leary as well because right once again he did not become rich

00:53:50.740 by doing the things that he's telling us to do he did not become rich by what getting a cheaper

00:53:57.340 lunch and then setting aside the money that he would have spent on a sweet green and instead

00:54:02.960 investing it and letting the wealth grow over time and now he has a 10 million dollar chalet

00:54:09.360 second home on a lake somewhere that's not he did it by scamming people yep and what is a scam if 0.98

00:54:16.240 not saying you're the sucker and i'm the exploiter and there's not enough exploiters to suckers in 0.79

00:54:23.080 the ratio to make this an actual viable path for advice for other people and i also just have to 0.95

00:54:30.120 say, like maybe there are places in probably more like rural or suburban in the middle of the

00:54:37.700 country areas where $28 is like a nice lunch. But if you live in one of the cities that Kevin O'Leary

00:54:45.160 no doubt thinks that young people should live in if they want to get the best jobs, $28 is sweet

00:54:51.340 green and a can of seltzer. Absolutely. This is fast, casual pricing. So essentially what he's

00:54:57.080 saying is like any form of like not packing yourself a sandwich in a brown paper bag is 0.97

00:55:01.840 luxury that young people should not be partaking in if they ever want to own a house, which is just

00:55:06.480 crazy. It's just crazy. Especially when you look at home prices and you look at how disproportionately

00:55:12.240 they're being held on to by people who have owned that property for so long. They're probably not

00:55:17.880 even paying a mortgage on it. And they probably had an interest rate of like two or three percent.

00:55:22.580 And so there's just not enough housing anymore.

00:55:25.540 It's a literal shortage in terms of like the actual physical housing that's available to people because we've allowed it to be so overly financialized.

00:55:34.680 But yeah, it's your lunch.

00:55:36.800 It's your lunch.

00:55:38.140 But Kevin O'Leary's advice for us doesn't end with food.

00:55:42.260 He's also graciously offered advice on what clothes we should be buying.

00:55:47.960 Here's Kevin.

00:55:48.920 And my mother, Georgette, taught me, and this really probably flows into why I buy these 0.99

00:55:52.980 watches, don't buy crap.

00:55:54.960 She used to only buy one Chanel jacket a year, but a really good one. 0.98

00:56:00.580 She loves Chanel. 0.98

00:56:02.020 And when she died, there was a catfight for her clothing amongst the women in my family 0.83

00:56:07.120 because they were now vintage Chanel's that were worth way more than what she paid for 0.99

00:56:12.280 them. 0.99

00:56:12.380 So most people, you go look in your closet, it's full of crap you don't need. 0.99

00:56:16.440 You bought crap that you just don't wear. 1.00

00:56:19.040 You wore it once and it's just crap. 1.00

00:56:20.720 Don't buy the crap. 1.00

00:56:22.080 Buy the good stuff and just buy less of it. 0.99

00:56:26.100 I would love to see his mother's dry cleaning, Bill.

00:56:29.260 I mean, the more that I listened to this man over the last week, 1.00

00:56:35.440 the more it crystallized to me that his mother was fucking rich. 1.00

00:56:41.120 And that's fine. 0.99

00:56:42.400 But does Kevin O'Leary know what a Chanel jacket costs?

00:56:45.080 Do you know what a Chanel jacket costs?

00:56:46.440 As a tomboy, I'm going to guess a Chanel jacket's like $2,000.

00:56:53.740 Oh, Emma.

00:56:55.280 No.

00:56:58.960 I'm not into clothes and fashion.

00:57:02.220 I'm really...

00:57:03.660 That's a lot of money.

00:57:05.300 Do you think a Chanel jacket costs $2,000 today?

00:57:07.840 Yes, that was my guess.

00:57:09.340 Oh, I was going to say, like, maybe in the 60s or 70s.

00:57:14.020 No, maybe they were a little less than $2,000 then.

00:57:16.440 uh if you take a scroll on chanel's website as i did okay chanel.com is that where i go

00:57:24.220 i'm just gonna do this in real time what does hot couture mean i love the gender role reversal

00:57:29.540 we get to do though it's fun it's fun yeah i mean like look yeah my personality i've never

00:57:34.760 been into the fashions i there's no way for me to even look at prices it's just photos can you

00:57:40.240 Okay, well, that's because you're in the haute couture section.

00:57:47.600 Haute couture is...

00:57:48.560 What does that even mean?

00:57:55.260 Okay, haute couture.

00:57:58.240 It's basically when the fashion house designs specifically for a person.

00:58:05.160 There are only, I think, like 4,000 people around the world who are rich enough to be

00:58:11.680 customers of Haute Couture.

00:58:13.380 You have like a direct relationship with the fashion house.

00:58:15.540 Don't ask me how I know this.

00:58:16.740 Clearly, I'm not one of those customers.

00:58:19.400 But I mean, look, you were talking fashion the other night when we went out to dinner

00:58:23.740 and I had no idea what you were talking about then.

00:58:25.780 So you're educating me.

00:58:27.440 I've been working on it ever since they crucified me.

00:58:29.960 Anyway, I mean, Haute Couture, that's not even what we're talking about.

00:58:33.280 but that can be like hundreds of thousands of dollars for an outfit but ready to wear if we

00:58:38.200 just look at ready to wear which still on hundreds of thousands of dollars for an outfit yeah yeah

00:58:43.600 yeah okay ready to wear which is the things that like if you went into a chanel store and you saw

00:58:49.320 a jacket and you were like i'd love this in a medium or whatever like that's ready to wear

00:58:52.980 that's like they've made it it's ready to wear off the rack uh i went to the chanel website because

00:58:58.000 i was like these things kind of get more expensive every year uh what is what's the going rate the

00:59:02.720 most sort of like basic standard Chanel jacket that I clicked on that you would think of when

00:59:08.640 you think of a Chanel jacket is $13,350. Okay, I was pretty off. But I don't think Kevin O'Leary

00:59:19.560 knows that. I don't think he cares. Exactly. It's a scam. He's just I mean, who knows if this is

00:59:24.820 even true about his mother? I have no idea if this is the case. Why would it matter? And the

00:59:28.980 fact that he keeps invoking her in this business context feels like another scam in and of itself

00:59:33.980 i'm seeing if you got 28 lunches every day would it equal one chanel jacket it would not it would

00:59:41.680 be about ten thousand dollars wow keep your sweet green kids but if you put it in some sort of

00:59:47.080 investment vehicle after a year if you skipped your sweet green you could potentially if the

00:59:53.380 investment goes the right way and trump doesn't crash the economy save up enough for all of your

00:59:58.800 miss lunches to be one chanel jacket that you can get dry cleaned every week or every day

01:00:04.820 potentially because you don't have any other clothing you could also just eat the jacket

01:00:08.460 those fibers have got to be nutritious i mean that how else can you justify that cost

01:00:15.460 meanwhile i'm like should i spend 40 on this nick sweatshirt that i really want geez

01:00:22.220 i should mention kevin o'leary briefly ran for leadership of canada's conservative party

01:00:30.700 do you know this yes i did all i know about it is that he like tried and failed to be like

01:00:36.780 canada's trump i think that they had some better conservative representation by you know ford but

01:00:44.280 i'm not necessarily sure if i remember anything more than this shout out to canada i know you

01:00:49.420 guys would grill me if I didn't include that he had a sort of failed political run. But he still

01:00:53.380 tries to, you know, influence politics wherever he goes, including the United States, where he now

01:00:57.860 lives in Miami Beach after a one boating incident. I'm going to tell you about the boating incident.

01:01:04.480 And before I do so, I will tell you that in March 2025, a crypto influencer named Ben Armstrong

01:01:12.080 accused Kevin O'Leary of murder and claimed that O'Leary had paid millions of dollars to cover up

01:01:18.560 the boating incident. Kevin O'Leary responded with a defamation lawsuit and won approximately

01:01:24.940 $2.8 million. So I would just like to once again, make it very clear and look into the camera that

01:01:31.400 the O'Leary's have never murdered anyone with their boat or paid to cover it up. Any suggestion

01:01:37.520 that they did is categorically false. And now I would like to tell the story of what happened in

01:01:43.820 august of 2019 i would also say that the o'leary's had never murdered anyone with their boat or paid

01:01:48.920 millions to cover it up any suggestion that they did is categorically false shall we yeah on the

01:01:55.280 final saturday of august 2019 kevin o'leary and his wife were at their idyllic estate on lake

01:02:02.760 joseph lake joseph is a tiny body of water in an exclusive cottage country region of canada

01:02:10.160 about a two hours drive from Toronto. The lake is surrounded by expensive summer homes,

01:02:16.160 including the O'Leary's, a 10-bedroom, 11-bathroom, 9,800-square-foot mega mansion.

01:02:23.280 That's too big of a house to have for your vacation home. I'm sorry. You got to max out

01:02:28.220 in single-digit bedrooms. I'm done. I'm done with this crap.

01:02:31.160 They need extra rooms for all of Georgette's Chanel jackets that she didn't need. 0.98

01:02:35.640 across the lake that night some of the o'leary's wealthy friends were having a dinner party the

01:02:43.080 o'leary's decided to drive to said dinner party on their luxury speedboat a cobalt bow rider they

01:02:50.600 stayed at that party until approximately 11 p.m when it was time to boat home in the dark linda

01:02:56.740 was driving and she'd been drinking which her lawyers never disputed but when she had the

01:03:02.740 drinks was disputed. Put a pin in that. She was also driving at a, quote, significant speed per

01:03:08.060 police records, but the exact speed was never specified. Just got to say girl bossing here and 1.00

01:03:14.800 shout out to Kevin for being such a feminist that he allowed his wife to drive the boat in pitch 1.00

01:03:20.940 black. He got to sit as a passenger. Well, I will say after all of this went down, there was sort of 1.00

01:03:26.080 like the rumor mill around like, did Kevin O'Leary throw his wife under the bus? And was he actually

01:03:32.140 driving. I believe that Linda was driving, but it's all alleged. Anyway, around the corner from

01:03:38.640 them, also on the lake, another dinner party was being hosted that night by Irv Edwards, a doctor

01:03:44.620 and businessman. Edwards and 11 of his friends headed out on his speedboat to stargaze on the

01:03:51.540 lake. Irv Edwards allowed his friend Richard Rue, a general physician from New York, to drive the

01:03:57.660 boat that night. They drove the boat a little ways out from their house and stopped on the lake

01:04:02.040 and turned off their navigation lights so they could see the stars better.

01:04:06.680 Passengers of that boat would later say that they actually turned the lights back on.

01:04:11.140 The O'Leary's dispute this.

01:04:12.820 They say the lights were totally off on that boat.

01:04:15.620 Not seeing the Edwards boat due to some disputed combination of darkness, alcohol, and speed,

01:04:21.460 the O'Leary's boat slammed into the front of the Edwards boat, then traveled up and over it.

01:04:28.380 At the time, two people were stargazing on the front triangle section.

01:04:33.360 You know how the front of boats will have that little, like, triangle where you can sit?

01:04:35.980 There were two people sitting in that section of the boat.

01:04:38.340 Susanna Brito, a 48-year-old mother of three, and Gary Poltash, a 68-year-old man from Florida.

01:04:45.420 Poltash was killed on impact.

01:04:47.920 Brito was knocked unconscious and later died in the hospital a few days later.

01:04:53.040 Linda O'Leary injured her ankle, and Kevin was unhurt.

01:04:57.220 oof yeah okay um there are way too many just in terms of like the proportions incidents of boating

01:05:06.220 issues while drinking with wealthy people probably because wealthy people are more likely to have

01:05:14.200 boats but this feels like another incident where it's just another shady situation where people

01:05:21.060 have been drinking and they decide to drive boats. And turns out that's still a motor vehicle

01:05:28.320 and there are other people on these bodies of water. Yeah, that's right. After exchanging a

01:05:34.380 few words between the O'Leary boat and the Edwards boat, the Edwards boat rushed back to shore for

01:05:40.260 help while the O'Leary's continued to their nearby cottage. The O'Leary's son, Trevor, called 911

01:05:46.340 after the O'Leary's got home. Wait, can I just ask you to clarify? So they went home? They didn't

01:05:53.260 stay when they knew that they had crashed into this other boat, allegedly? Well, Kevin has been

01:05:59.460 litigious about the claim that he fled. So I won't say that he fled the scene, but they did

01:06:05.900 factually go to their home after the collision occurred. They did not stay together. Okay. That

01:06:12.240 is, I think, important information. The police officer who arrived at their house smelled

01:06:18.680 alcohol on Linda's breath and had her take a breathalyzer test, which revealed that her

01:06:26.000 blood alcohol content was between 50 and 99 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of

01:06:32.160 blood, which is bordering on the legal limit to drive a boat or I believe a car. I think it's

01:06:37.340 the same thing which is which is 80 milligrams 0.8 is that a legal limit i don't know i live in

01:06:42.820 new york we don't drive yeah yeah i haven't thought about this in so long it's why when i go out to la

01:06:49.380 everyone is so like less of an alcoholic than us here in new york it's like because they have to

01:06:53.960 think about driving and we're like all right whatever on the subway when the officer asked

01:06:59.280 linda what she had had to drink linda said that she had been served a vodka drink upon arriving

01:07:05.860 home after the crash and couldn't remember who poured it. According to the O'Leary's son's

01:07:12.100 friend, Linda said after she got home that she, quote, needed a drink. I hesitate. I'm sorry to

01:07:17.520 do another Real Housewives reference, but I'm not saying this is the exact same incident. Joe

01:07:22.540 Judice once made the same claim after an incident in which there was a car that had been crashed

01:07:29.200 and there had been drinking involved. Yes. You drink when you get home. You definitely weren't

01:07:34.580 drinking during the period where you were driving no that's a great connection because a lot of the

01:07:41.060 articles that i read about this they noted that this is a common tactic and i'm not saying that

01:07:45.040 linda did or didn't do anything but oftentimes when people are involved in a drunk driving

01:07:51.320 incident or something like that they'll drink after they get home once the police show up or

01:07:55.640 at least say that that's when they were drinking to be like well no i drank after i wasn't drunk

01:07:59.740 during. Right. At least say that. And we're, you know, that's what she said. That's what she said.

01:08:05.480 Linda O'Leary was charged with careless operation of a vessel. Richard Rue, who was driving the

01:08:11.820 other boat, was charged with failing to display a navigation light. All three parties, the O'Leary's

01:08:18.400 Richard Rue and Irv Edwards, denied responsibility for the crash. And after two years, Linda's

01:08:24.540 charges were dropped because prosecutors couldn't meet the burden of proof to show that she was

01:08:29.720 driving without proper care. Paula Brito, the sister of the late Susanna Brito, said, quote,

01:08:35.360 it's a slap on the wrist for them and a slap on the face for the families. I don't know. I'm not

01:08:41.640 usually one to do a cop out of like, I think that there were multiple people at fault here.

01:08:46.780 What I do think, though, is that there were multiple people at fault here. I think that

01:08:52.020 Linda O'Leary probably, maybe, allegedly, had at least a drink in her at the time, perhaps,

01:08:58.820 allegedly. And, you know, she was probably driving faster than one should drive on a boat at nighttime 0.88

01:09:06.480 when it's total darkness. And as they tell it, the other boat had no lights on at all, which

01:09:12.180 seems to be the fault of the operator of the other boat, if true. I've read a lot of like forums

01:09:18.540 from like boating people talking about this. And they're like, if the other person didn't have

01:09:22.160 their lights on, then it's very, very, very hard to see the other boat. It seems like they were

01:09:25.920 stargazing which would make sense as to why they had the lights off so they could see the stars

01:09:30.920 there have been other incidents vehicular manslaughter that is not this of course it's

01:09:36.380 just another incident where there were charges right where I can understand saying like we

01:09:42.500 should differentiate between somebody who's maliciously killing somebody and somebody who

01:09:46.420 does it by accident I mean Caitlyn Jenner is an example of somebody who hit someone with their car

01:09:52.740 And that was clearly not intentional. However, I do think that we can still be clear eyed and critique a level of impunity that applies to the wealthy. And in these boating incidents, I feel like it's on steroids because the people that are out there boating under these conditions tend to be wealthier people.

01:10:14.160 That's right. And ultimately, the people who died were not operating either of the boats. And based on, to my understanding, all tellings of this story from all sides, it sounds like both boats were doing something wrong. Yet, there was basically no justice, as you might imagine.

01:10:31.920 Wrongful death lawsuits were filed by the victims' families in the direction of both boat drivers.

01:10:38.180 The claims of Brito's children, who at the time of the crash were 12, 11, and 9 years old at the time,

01:10:45.200 alleged negligence in the operation of both boats resulting in the death of their mother

01:10:49.840 and sought damages for loss of guidance, care and companionship, loss of dependency, and loss of services.

01:10:55.200 Now, the O'Leary's also sued, jointly claiming more than $3 million for economic loss, pain and suffering, and emotional distress, and the loss of enjoyment of life.

01:11:09.860 Per Toronto Life magazine, quote, one of the O'Leary's wealthy neighbors said that the O'Leary's felt they were being unfairly persecuted because of their wealth and fame.

01:11:19.800 Oh, man.

01:11:21.460 Yeah.

01:11:22.480 They're being discriminated against.

01:11:24.320 It's a protected class. Don't you understand? The rich people who were able to have the means to

01:11:30.960 vote in this elite area at this time of night are the victims for being put in this circumstance.

01:11:37.840 The O'Leary's lawyered up. They retained Brian Greenspan, who's a famous celebrity lawyer.

01:11:43.260 They also utilized Kevin O'Leary's agent, Jay Shores, who is the vice chairman of UTA,

01:11:48.940 one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood, United Talent Agency, to flood the press with

01:11:54.360 Kevin's side of the story, which is the following, quote, on a late night, I was a passenger in a

01:12:00.340 boat that was involved in a tragic collision with another watercraft that had no navigation lights

01:12:05.780 on and then fled the scene of the accident, saying the other boat fled the scene. I am fully

01:12:12.280 cooperating with law enforcement and their investigation out of respect for the victim's

01:12:15.520 families and to fully support the ongoing investigation I feel it is inappropriate

01:12:19.200 to make further comments at this time my heartfelt prayers and condolences to the victims the family

01:12:24.660 and those affected by this loss I think it's interesting because one could plausibly read

01:12:30.100 this and think that like the O'Leary's were the victims isn't that the case kind of I feel like

01:12:34.980 when you have wealthy lawyers like that and it's these battles between wealthy people I mean the

01:12:40.440 Gwyneth Paltrowski incident comes to mind. That is the tactic that is most effective. They have

01:12:48.200 the means from a legal perspective to fight back against endless claims. And so you are not going

01:12:56.040 to take a more conciliatory approach as a defense attorney if you understand that you have the

01:13:01.820 resources to engage in a protracted legal fight with the other side. So I feel like you

01:13:07.300 disproportionately see this with wealthier people the portrayal of them as a victim as opposed to

01:13:12.660 like if you're poorer you're going to have some sort of public defense lawyer that is going to

01:13:18.100 say hey it might be time to settle or accept these kinds of charges for a lesser sentence

01:13:24.320 now within months the o'leary's were back living large they were doing their like rich person

01:13:31.180 fundraiser dinners, like life kind of just continued on as normal. And in January of

01:13:35.880 2026, almost seven years after the boat crash, they reached a settlement with the family

01:13:42.700 of the victims. Now, we don't know everything about that settlement, but two of the Brito

01:13:47.880 children who were still minors at the time the settlement was made, one of them, like

01:13:52.380 so much time had passed that one of the kids had turned 18, the 12 year old. But two of

01:13:56.940 the children who are still minors, we know the details of their settlement, which is that the

01:14:02.500 O'Leary's paid each child $100,000 minus legal fees. And by the time the legal fees, prorated

01:14:09.440 costs, taxes, and fees were added and deducted to the various subtotals, each child was given

01:14:15.320 $72,538.56, which is to be held by the court until they turn 18. Also, Alex Poltash, Gary's

01:14:26.060 adult son, the other victim's adult son, started a GoFundMe for the kids, which raised $25,000.

01:14:32.360 So that's what they got.

01:14:33.040 Gotta say, for an incident that is that traumatic with that kind of loss,

01:14:38.320 it feels like a bit of a pittance in terms of the settlement that was reached.

01:14:43.340 Yes. I just, you know, it is one thing for like an accident to go horribly, horribly wrong.

01:14:50.700 Right? I'm with you. Like there is like memes about this boat crash and people are like,

01:14:54.400 Kevin O'Leary is a murderer. Kevin O'Leary is a murderer. Whatever. We can we can you in the 0.99

01:14:58.760 comments can get into the alleged details of what allegedly happened. But the thing that I think is

01:15:04.440 very clear is that like the O'Leary's kind of said, fuck you afterwards. Right. They could have 1.00

01:15:10.620 offered a much larger sum than they initially were forced to agree to. And they probably I don't know

01:15:18.680 the details of their arrangement with their lawyer, but I'd imagine that they paid well over

01:15:23.820 what they settled for each child on an annual basis just to fight it and it goes to show and

01:15:30.600 i think you can see a lot of this in high profile wealthy legal battles how immaterial the actual

01:15:38.740 material elements of this are to the people involved so much of our civil litigation when

01:15:44.460 it comes to these and this is in canada so i'm not fully understanding in terms of like their

01:15:49.480 system or I don't have a great grasp on it. But just from the egos of, you know, Western white

01:15:55.040 rich people, it's almost a sport for them to play this out in court as opposed to anything that's

01:16:00.500 material, because I would imagine that the O'Leary's could have saved a lot of money

01:16:03.960 if they just decided, hey, we're going to give these kids this amount and it's going to be a

01:16:09.620 lot more than we end up settling on. But we're going to just wash our hands of this and make

01:16:13.980 sure we do the right thing. Yeah, they chose something different. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great

01:16:18.380 takeaway and my only other one which is kind of the same one is just that it's just like there's

01:16:23.800 no justice in this system if you're up against someone with the money like kevin o'leary has 0.97

01:16:30.360 clearly it doesn't look like the families or at least the brito children in that family 0.75

01:16:35.360 had the same resources as the two people driving the boats in the incident that killed her

01:16:40.020 and there's just no justice there's just no justice and that's another reason why i think 0.99

01:16:44.580 Kevin O'Leary is a great stand in for like every rich asshole because he kind of just hits all the 0.99

01:16:48.960 beats. Well said. Well said. I really don't have too much to add to that, honestly. Should we talk 1.00

01:16:53.500 about the data center? Yes. So if you haven't heard, Kevin O'Leary is currently a primary

01:17:00.300 developer of a massive data center in Box Elder County, Utah, called the Stratos AI Data Center.

01:17:08.020 The data center would be one of the largest in the world. It would be roughly 62 square miles,

01:17:13.500 aka 40,000 acres, aka two Manhattans, aka 30,000 football fields. The data center would consume

01:17:23.560 nine gigawatts of power, which I believe is currently more than twice as much as the entire

01:17:28.440 state of Utah. Oh yes, you are absolutely right about that. For just the Kevin O'Leary data

01:17:34.240 center, more important than the entire topography and population of the state of Utah. According to

01:17:40.280 Utah Clean Energy, the data center would use 16.6 billion gallons of water per year to operate

01:17:46.060 or 25,000 Olympic sized swimming pools in a state, mind you, that has been plagued by drought

01:17:53.780 for years. This is a fight that's happening across the country. And it's not just the Kevin O'Leary

01:17:59.960 of it all. But I do think that his cartoonish kind of rich guy thing, plus the sheer scale and size

01:18:07.480 of it when you compare it to the overall ability of utah to serve the people that live there in

01:18:13.980 general uh makes it such a stark example of how these data centers and the developers behind it

01:18:21.540 are trying to sprint to outpace the coming populist anger and rage about what these data

01:18:29.640 centers are going to do to communities and they're trying to undemocratically get ahead

01:18:35.020 of the reaction by like other tech companies asking for permission after already doing something

01:18:42.260 that is indelible and that is unchangeable and that the forces of capital are already behind it

01:18:48.060 so you have the snowballs momentum by the way no more snowballs i guess in utah anymore one of the

01:18:53.220 top skiing locations in the country if this kind of thing goes through it is in many ways an example

01:19:00.960 of how the ai and these tech companies are in a metaphorical sense the house that we all live in

01:19:08.400 right they're breaking into it we've figured it out we've come back from dinner we got up to the

01:19:15.380 house the doors are locked we can't get in they're barricaded we're trying to use our keys wait what's

01:19:20.080 going on here the people in ai i think zionist too capitalist interest oil and gas all of this

01:19:27.080 The existing power players in capitalism have locked the door and barricaded it, and they're ransacking the house and going out the back door before we can get in the front way. And I think O'Leary is an example of this. I think the Trump administration is a real example of this. And it just goes to show how much of a threat true democracy and populist anger against their actions are to these very people.

01:19:54.760 well said good metaphor thanks painting a good picture in my mind well it's a bad picture but

01:20:00.880 painting it well kevin o'leary lives right now in miami beach florida because obviously no shade

01:20:07.260 but walter masterson who's great uh did this video where he went to miami beach florida to

01:20:14.240 the specific area that kevin o'leary lives in and he was like going up to residents being like

01:20:19.300 should we build a data center on the beach right here i think it would be a great way to outpace 0.97

01:20:24.620 china in the ai race and they were all like what the fuck get the fuck out of here no we're not 1.00

01:20:29.520 building a fucking data center and it's like yeah because kevin o'leary doesn't want that in his 0.99

01:20:33.100 backyard no but also thinks that like anyone protesting it in utah is a paid agent of the 0.99

01:20:39.960 chinese government which we're gonna get to in a second yeah we'll get into that in a second and

01:20:43.280 i want to unpack some of the kind of cold war mythology that he's copy pasting onto his own

01:20:48.940 self-interest but i think the reason that utah is notable and maybe o'leary wasn't anticipating 0.96

01:20:53.940 this pushback is that elon musk was smart enough to know that america is a pretty damn racist 0.98

01:20:58.860 country so i'm going to stick my grok ai in memphis a predominantly black city and poison this area 0.96

01:21:04.220 and understand that they're largely not going to get a ton of pushback i mean gosh tennessee just 0.99

01:21:10.020 disenfranchised almost that entire metro area by carving it up in the state legislature in a

01:21:16.420 redistricting fight so they've been disenfranchised politically and it's easier for someone like elon 0.88

01:21:22.180 Musk to go in and pollute a population that's majority black. Utah, maybe a bit of a different

01:21:26.700 story. So Kevin O'Leary, less rich than Elon Musk, more pathetic than Elon Musk, and not as good at 0.99

01:21:33.900 his job as Elon Musk. Just throwing that out there. Yeah. And to be more pathetic than Elon 0.98

01:21:39.060 Musk. I mean, that is one achievement Kevin O'Leary can say he has. Yes, exactly. This data 0.99

01:21:45.020 center project, which is under construction, has garnered massive protests in Utah and really

01:21:51.000 around the country, but huge protests in Utah. Shout out to everyone in Utah who might be

01:21:56.540 listening to this, who has been showing up for that. You are seriously like doing the Lord's

01:22:02.200 work in this country. Kevin O'Leary does not know how to handle pushback to anything because like

01:22:08.500 everyone of his stature, he has the most fragile ego in existence. Of course, one of the primary

01:22:14.820 motivators of those protesters are the environmental concerns of the data center. Kevin O'Leary has

01:22:20.220 this insane canned response to the environmental inquiry which is this how are you offsetting the

01:22:27.440 how are you offsetting these environmental concerns well i'm actually the only uh developer

01:22:33.060 of data centers on earth that graduated from environmental studies emma he said this in like

01:22:38.860 16 different interviews i think i'm the only guy doing this that graduated from environmental

01:22:44.240 studies that's good that's good to know that you studied environmental science as you destroy the

01:22:49.860 environment it's almost like you got a peek into the beauty that you're about to completely erase

01:22:56.360 from the planet he goes on to say in that specific video which is like uh he i guess he's learning

01:23:01.480 the art of like oh we got to do front to camera videos in the car now like we have to be intimate

01:23:06.600 with our fans and the people who hate us he goes on to be like as someone who studied environmental

01:23:11.700 science i'm aware of all of these options we could do solar power sustainability is is at the heart

01:23:18.340 of what we do in terms of all these proposals.

01:23:20.820 And so we search for the best technology.

01:23:23.200 There's many air-cooled turbines now.

01:23:25.560 So you're blending in air-cooled versus water.

01:23:29.160 There's so many different ways to generate power.

01:23:31.840 We can also put a percentage of the power generation

01:23:34.260 through solar, wind, and batteries.

01:23:36.160 I want to, he's also said this a hundred times,

01:23:37.980 I want to set the standard for sustainability

01:23:40.000 and data center construction.

01:23:42.220 I am going to show them these data centers.

01:23:44.640 They're going to be this shining example

01:23:46.200 of how you do this sustainably

01:23:47.400 because I'm the only guy that is graduated out of environmental studies and builds data centers.

01:23:54.220 No one else on Earth has done that.

01:23:55.580 Meanwhile, this data center is just not utilizing any of those methods that he's putting forth.

01:24:02.020 It's being powered entirely by natural gas.

01:24:04.560 Well, the technology is not there to actually power these data centers with green energy.

01:24:13.320 It's just not there.

01:24:14.440 The chips that are necessary, the energy that is necessary, they're using the easiest, cheapest energy systems to make sure that they're able to sprint to the finish line again ahead of the populist anger about this.

01:24:29.300 There are technologies that are being developed to make things a little bit more environmentally sustainable, like in terms of like how some of this heat and energy can be absorbed.

01:24:37.440 right? But in part, the administration that's in power right now, Trump, has killed a lot of these

01:24:43.200 projects that were focused on researching this kind of thing. It's crazy to see guys like Kevin

01:24:50.100 O'Leary, other folks who are trying to make sure that these AI data centers are built as quickly

01:24:54.740 as possible, circumvent the real concerns that so many people have about this happening in their

01:25:01.220 backyard. Now, for example, AI data centers, just like if you don't care about the environment at

01:25:06.960 all are driving up energy costs for so many Americans. Electricity usage is largely flatlining

01:25:15.460 when it comes to the usage by everyday people. But for commercial and industrial usage,

01:25:22.020 it's going crazy because these data centers are taking up so much of our electrical capacity

01:25:28.600 and energy capacity across the country. And there are no guardrails in place to make sure that they

01:25:34.480 bear more of that cost. And it's being offset onto consumers with your regular energy and

01:25:39.960 electricity bills. So it's a real problem. And they're banking on the fact that the regulatory

01:25:46.100 framework has not caught up to the tactics that they're using. And they are right to bet on this.

01:25:51.140 This is a tactic that tech has used more broadly, whether it's Uber in major cities like in New York,

01:25:57.900 where you had cab drivers who had paid and saved up so much of their life, as Kevin O'Leary would

01:26:03.580 say, by the way, they saved up all their money to buy a medallion, which allows you to drive a taxi

01:26:09.220 cab in New York City. It's like an investment in your own individual small business, and it's not

01:26:13.860 cheap. And when Uber came to town, basically, they marketed themselves as a tech company and

01:26:20.100 not a cab company. And they were able to circumvent the regulations and the medallion requirements

01:26:25.320 that cab drivers in the city had to pay into and invest into. With the stroke of a pen,

01:26:32.560 Tech was able to come in and make sure that so many of these cab drivers, not just that their jobs were obsolete, but that their investment into their own individual small business was all for naught.

01:26:44.740 And Zora Mamdani, current mayor of New York, did hunger strikes with cab drivers on this very issue.

01:26:50.320 But there were also many who truly killed themselves, literally, in front of City Hall in protest for how this immiserated them and ruined their livelihood.

01:27:00.560 And if we had stronger leadership at the time, that could have been prevented. It's not to say that Uber wouldn't have eventually come into the city, but it's to say that we could have made sure that those cab drivers were whole and that their whole lives weren't completely destroyed by the emergence of this new rideshare technology.

01:27:18.120 And so I see this very similarly when it comes to AI, where they're trying to get ahead of these really salient and important practical concerns about what this is going to mean for the everyday people that they're going to impact with the construction of their data center with this technology.

01:27:36.360 And I just want to return a little bit to the China competition narrative.

01:27:39.940 Can I tee you up for that?

01:27:40.800 Oh, yes, please.

01:27:42.140 And I also just want to applaud everything that you just said.

01:27:44.140 Well, I need a glass of water because I've been talking for too long.

01:27:47.600 So this gives me a real opportunity to sip.

01:27:50.200 You earned it, sister. That was really, really good.

01:27:52.540 Like I said, the data center in Utah has drawn these massive, massive protests, to which Kevin O'Leary says the following.

01:28:01.220 The thing that got me motivated, though, was watching in the last two years this narrative in North America about how negative data centers are.

01:28:11.820 started in virginia actually the idea that they consume a lot of water that they are very noisy

01:28:17.820 and all that's true from stuff that was built 15 years ago but today that's not the case

01:28:22.060 and yet the narrative kept going and i thought who's doing this who would who would not want us

01:28:27.980 to have compute power who would not want us to build our power grid out because when you build

01:28:32.540 a data center today you have to develop your own power and you can sell it back to the grid that's 0.93

01:28:36.220 we're doing in utah i'm thinking to myself the chinese they don't want us to do that and i went 0.91

01:28:43.580 through that whole thing with tiktok as you may recall and i actually saw the evidence of how the 0.93

01:28:47.940 chinese were manipulating the algorithm now they're doing it a different way and that just kind of 1.00

01:28:53.100 pisses me off so i'm happy to add compute i'm like i i don't want my kids in 20 years who live 1.00

01:29:00.120 in new york being told what to eat for breakfast by the chinese if i were the chinese the last thing 1.00

01:29:05.640 I want in America is the five or six tech companies that are competing with me on DeepSeek 0.82

01:29:11.740 having more compute capacity. I want to shut down every single proposal for every single

01:29:18.440 data center in every single state. And I want agitators. I want paid protesters. I want

01:29:25.580 environmentalists. I want to shut it all down so that they can't train their models as fast as I 0.67

01:29:31.800 can. Okay, so much there. So what he's basically saying is that any negativity you may feel

01:29:38.420 towards a data center, much less being built in your own backyard, is direct or indirect influence

01:29:46.580 from China, because China's motivated to get you to go out and protest those data centers so China

01:29:53.320 can get ahead with the technology. It's not all of the very real environmental claims that

01:29:58.820 environmentalists have so graciously brought forth and publicized. It is not the threat of

01:30:05.760 misinformation, especially coming up on a midterm election and then a presidential election not long

01:30:11.180 after that. It is not the total erosion of jobs, especially the first rung of jobs in so many

01:30:19.500 industries that now college graduates can't enter into at all. It's none of those things. It is

01:30:25.520 Chinese propaganda on TikTok. What about spiritual Israeli stuff? Are we going to bring that back up 0.92

01:30:32.780 again? But I guess we'll stay on track for just a second to talk about the cynical usage of Cold

01:30:39.300 War narratives to copy paste your business model into what, you know, previously fueled certain

01:30:48.060 investment, which was the idea that we had to defeat communism with the USSR. And we have to

01:30:54.020 be engaging in this kind of competition. Now, back in the day, I don't think a lot of this was good.

01:31:00.200 It resulted in many wars. The Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cold War was disastrous for so

01:31:07.520 many people across the world. Kissinger's brutalization of Cambodia. I mean, you know,

01:31:13.060 the genocide there, we could go on and on. But at the very least, when the United States was 0.60

01:31:18.440 competing with the ussr in the cold war we had the united states's like government involved

01:31:25.120 directly more in say the space race uh that was state investment which is a lot more direct it

01:31:31.400 allows for less waste than when you have capitalists controlling certain competitive

01:31:37.360 arrangements because especially in this very highly financialized system that we live in

01:31:43.380 There are investors that take the top off and extract so much of the value that could be going towards investing in the technology. This is to put aside for a second the immense environmental impacts that he's completely skating over.

01:31:57.440 We are not in a system right now in our economy where we can adequately orient our resources to be competitive with China on things like AI. 0.84

01:32:08.840 That is it's already gone. It's lost.

01:32:11.120 I encourage everybody to look up Carbon Brief, this real analysis I cite all the time.

01:32:15.760 It's inconvenient here in the United States.

01:32:18.100 But China has been growing at its most rapid pace in its history.

01:32:22.900 and last year they were able to decline carbon emissions by one percent in the final quarter of

01:32:31.400 the year securing a decline for 0.3 percent for the full year as a whole meaning china is growing

01:32:38.060 at its largest pace and they have also in a year reduced carbon emissions and are building out an

01:32:44.480 infrastructure that is more resilient and less reliant on fossil fuels that is how a government

01:32:50.280 that has actual like state capacity that can direct these kinds of investments is operating.

01:32:56.560 It's a government that understands that they want to set themselves up, China, to be a future global

01:33:01.820 hegemon. And the way to do that is to reduce reliance on oil and gas, on coal, on all of 0.78

01:33:08.600 this dirty energy that's going by the wayside. What is the United States doing in comparison?

01:33:13.860 we are turbocharging fossil fuel emissions. We are tripling down on it via our investment in

01:33:21.420 the Middle East. And Trump is orienting foreign policy towards that. But even in the way that

01:33:27.380 we're scrapping these climate projects, and it's all going towards building out these AI data

01:33:32.620 centers, the way that they're being built is not going to be sustainable, even in a neutral race 0.62

01:33:38.700 with China about what data is being collected by these AI data centers. So I bring this up to just

01:33:45.660 really say that this is a silly attempt to use a Cold War framework that no longer applies to get

01:33:54.420 rubes to invest in certain AI companies so that these guys can make more and more money under the

01:34:00.560 guise of competition with China. When that competition is already done, it's over. It's been

01:34:05.820 lost we don't have an efficient economy anymore these people at the very top are extracting so

01:34:11.960 much wealth that could be going towards even if you only cared about the ai race with china

01:34:17.520 towards improving that technology instead it goes towards making these guys rich and they are trying

01:34:24.460 to get and double dip they're trying to get the american people to bear the brunt of it from an

01:34:30.800 environmental perspective, from a government priority perspective, in a variety of different

01:34:36.580 communities across the country. And so again, Kevin O'Leary with his, you know, children's

01:34:42.680 hospital closing face that he shows all the time, I think is not being honest about the reality

01:34:50.420 about competition with China. And it's just a way to use a national security framework to obscure

01:34:56.000 for valid environmental and societal concerns. Yeah, that was said better than anything I could

01:35:02.120 have said. But I don't know. No, it definitely is. And I do know about that. But I will add,

01:35:07.620 I heard a quote recently that I thought was really good, which is just that in the race

01:35:11.760 to beat China at AI, the only winner is AI. Right. And I mean, you know, we're about to

01:35:17.380 have one of the worst El Ninos ever. I mean, last year, do we remember that California was on fire?

01:35:22.580 Like, this is really a major problem and an accelerant of climate change. And when we talk about fascism, I think it's important because a lot of times people on the left are afraid to call certain things fascism, and you have people on the right that will try to corner you and be like, you don't even know what fascism is.

01:35:42.480 you're the true fascist because you demand terms of service for anti-translurs on social media 0.55

01:35:48.340 companies the reality is that fascism it's an outgrowth of hitler and mussolini's ideologies 0.66

01:35:54.580 and their reigns in the 20th century you can characterize it as high levels of militarism

01:35:59.880 high levels of nationalism anti-democracy that tries to circumvent the will of the people

01:36:06.160 And also particularly, I think importantly here for understanding this moment, when you use a mythologized past to talk about a revival that involves encouraging suppression of marginalized groups and othering of them as a scapegoat and that being an important part of your state policy.

01:36:28.160 But also in regards to this conversation about Kevin O'Leary and these data centers, the merging of the corporate and the state, the inability to discern between capitalist interests and the interests of the United States. 0.93

01:36:45.120 So with Peter Thiel and the broligarchy, it's hard not to look at their immense influence in the Trump administration and not describe it as fascism. 0.82

01:36:57.400 Kevin O'Leary is not a big player in that space. 0.78

01:37:00.620 Yeah.

01:37:00.860 But that's what's fun about him is like we can talk about these broader dynamics, I think, without the stakes that would be involved in, say, a Peter Thiel expose.

01:37:08.820 Yeah. And I mean, look, to the people in Utah, like the stakes are that high because Kevin O'Leary is that much of an imminent environmental and professional and economic threat to them. But it also is kind of funny to like think of him as like this pathetic little guy who like really wants to be part of like the proper oligarchy, but like isn't.

01:37:29.440 Right. I want to conclude here, if I may, referencing a film that I saw a while ago.

01:37:37.080 And I'm not one of those people that's like, I want to reference a film that I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024.

01:37:42.580 But I do. When I was at Sundance a couple of years ago, I saw a movie called Veni Vidi Vici, which means I came, I saw, I conquered.

01:37:51.260 And it was kind of a weird film. I don't even know if I really liked it.

01:37:54.720 But the premise was interesting.

01:37:56.000 It was about a really, really rich family that hunted human beings for sport.

01:38:02.520 You've learned this pretty early on in the movie.

01:38:05.540 And the whole town that they live in is sort of in crisis because they're like, oh, my God, people keep getting killed and people keep disappearing.

01:38:13.260 And where are they going and who's doing this and who's going to hold them accountable and what are we going to do?

01:38:17.060 And then one by one, as people within the government and within industry and within press realize that it is this family that is hunting people for sport, the family just titillates them into not revealing their secret and not holding them accountable by offering them jobs, by offering them scoops, by offering them whatever special interest it is that they need to sort of self-soothe.

01:38:45.060 and the movie just it's a little too long and it kind of makes its point pretty early on and then

01:38:50.480 just goes on for too long but i've i've thought about it so many times and i think about it with

01:38:55.560 someone like kevin o'leary or any of these rich assholes that movie obviously i i think it would 0.82

01:39:01.100 be a little bit of a stretch to say that kevin o'leary is literally hunting people for sport 0.97

01:39:05.900 you know the point that it was making is that this is the level of like death and destruction

01:39:11.640 and havoc that people like this wreak on society. And we let it happen when we allow ourselves

01:39:19.240 to buy into the myth that if we just look away, if we just turn our cheek to all of the horrible

01:39:25.960 things that are happening, we might be on their side of the equation soon enough. We could be in

01:39:31.320 their orbit. We could have money like them. We can buy into the myth the same way that Kevin O'Leary

01:39:37.120 says he did with the ice cream shop story. I don't know, like to me, and I try to always have

01:39:41.420 these, some might say rosy takeaways at the end of episodes, but it is the job of everyone to

01:39:47.900 divest themselves from that myth. You will never be able to scam the way that Kevin O'Leary scammed

01:39:54.940 because like I said, there's finite room for those scammers. And much like a multi-level

01:40:02.220 marketing scheme. Under American capitalism, it's basically all been filled up. Yeah. By people like

01:40:08.260 Kevin O'Leary. When you mentioned an MLM, there's a pyramid and that pyramid is not getting inverted

01:40:14.560 with the scammed being the minority. You know, in many ways, capitalism is a large scale pyramid

01:40:22.540 scheme. And it doesn't mean that we should feel like life is worthless or that we can't change

01:40:28.920 anything and that you know this economic system is so overbearing that we can't imagine a better

01:40:35.520 future it's just to maybe release some people of the internalized guilt that they felt that 0.97

01:40:41.360 kevin o'leary is so comfortable promulgating with self-help books and fuck josh safty for

01:40:48.720 casting kevin o'leary what was that literally just like so my husband outwoked me like i kind 0.99

01:40:57.560 of liked the movie and he was like he's such a scumbag emma i couldn't get into it why couldn't 0.99

01:41:03.060 they cast somebody that just played a scumbag and i could get into it and the more i sit with it i'm 0.98

01:41:08.600 like you outwoked me you outwoked me buddy you really did you're right i mean it's true if i mean 0.97

01:41:17.020 their whole thing was like i mean kevin said this in press conferences for marty supreme he was like 0.96

01:41:22.180 well it was just such a good fit because i'm such an asshole in real life and i was good at playing 0.99

01:41:26.720 an asshole on TV. And he was good at playing an asshole in the movie, but also so would have an 0.99

01:41:32.460 actor. Yeah, I got it. I mean, look, the Safdies, I liked the casting of Kevin Garnett in Uncut 0.99

01:41:39.260 Gems, but that was relevant because he was playing himself. You could have cast any SAG-AFTRA actor

01:41:45.140 to be in your production that would have been able to play a rich asshole. It's not like there 0.99

01:41:50.280 are a dearth of white men in Hollywood that could have done the exact same thing.

01:41:55.980 Emma, thank you so much for joining me.

01:41:58.500 I have to go and eat my Chanel jacket, but this was a real pleasure.

01:42:04.020 Good for you.

01:42:04.760 That is an appropriate allocation of your resources, and you're going to be able to

01:42:10.740 have a retirement now.

01:42:11.800 Congratulations.

01:42:13.000 Thank you so much.

01:42:13.520 I can't wait to be a homeowner.

01:42:15.140 Where can people find more of you besides on this very podcast?

01:42:19.620 The Majority Report with Sam Seder.

01:42:22.060 I am the non-Sam Seder.

01:42:23.360 we are live every weekday noon eastern at the majority report we are a daily progressive

01:42:30.820 political podcast we cover the news of the day we in the fun half do some mockery of right-wingers

01:42:38.380 but for the most part our first half is pretty dry and informative where we have experts on

01:42:42.600 would encourage people to check that out either on youtube or in podcast form join themajorityreport.com

01:42:48.380 look at that plug i've actually figured out how to do a real plug that was really good

01:42:52.500 That was really good.

01:42:53.960 Rattled it off, etched into the back of your brain.

01:42:56.460 Thank you so much for listening to this episode today.

01:43:00.200 I love you.

01:43:00.940 I hope you enjoyed it.

01:43:01.780 To all the Canadians who sent me messages that you were happy I was covering this burden that you have had to carry.

01:43:09.540 I hope I did it justice.

01:43:11.220 Thank you so much again to Emma.

01:43:13.420 Just so much fun collaborating with such a good friend.

01:43:17.260 It really does feel like hanging out.

01:43:19.200 Until next time.

01:43:21.120 I love you so much.

01:43:22.500 And stay fruity.

A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - May 29, 2026

Kevin O’Leary Is Lying

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