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

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

It’s time to dive into one of Canada’s worst exports. Kevin O’Leary a.k.a. “Mr. Wonderful” gained household recognition by performing as a mean venture capitalist on TV. As it turns out, the meanness might be the only honest aspect of his character. Today, Emma and I excavate Kevin’s personal and professional history to reveal a nesting doll of capitalist grifter hell. Grab your $28 avocado toast and strap in. Listen to bonus episodes on Patreon! Thanks to today’s sponsors! Everyone who signs up wins a FREE toy or gift card: https://www.bboutique.co/vibe/abitfruity-pod :) Support a fairer future free from religious overreach at https://humanist.org/fruity Watch Emma every weekday on The Majority Report. Find Emma on Instagram. Find me on Instagram. Find A Bit Fruity on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How are you offsetting these environmental concerns? Well, I'm actually the only developer of data centers on Earth that graduated from environmental studies. I think I'm the only guy doing this that graduated from environmental studies. You talked about the environment. By the way, I'm a graduate environmental study, so I understand the issues. I am going to show them these data centers. They're going to be this shining example of how you do this sustainably, because I'm the only guy that is graduate.

out of environmental studies and builds data centers. No one else on earth has done that. And welcome back to A BitFrudy. 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. Anyway, I literally have to say it. This man is litigious. Oh, good job protecting yourself legally, I got to say.

Thank you, dear. I knew I had to make this episode a few months ago when I watched a video of Nikki Minaj, declaring that she was Donald Trump's biggest fan. Um, I am probably the president's number one fan. To her left, of course, stood Donald Trump, but to her right stood Shark Tank panelist Mr. Wonderful, aka Canadian scammer, I mean businessman Kevin O'Leary. What was Kevin doing on stage with the MAGA Queen of Rap and Trump himself? I watched Shark Tank. I feel like we all had that phase. I never particularly enjoyed Kevin's contributions to the show,

but his meddling in right-wing U.S. politics seemed new to me. Of course, that shock did not last, as Canadian Kevin, in short order, has become part of everything bad happening in America. When Billy Eilish spoke out against ICE at the Grammys, Kevin went on Fox News the next day to tell her to quote, Shut your mouth and just entertain. He told Pete Hegseth that student protesters for Palestine

should abandon their cause less future employers use AI to identify them through their masks. 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. He was in Marty Supreme. And of course, he wants young people to stop spending $28 on lunch.

Can't stand it when I see kids that are making $70 grand a year, spending $28 for lunch. I mean, that's just stupid. We'll get to that. Today, in service of my Utah listeners who are battling it out with this piece of shit, and for the Canadians who have long dealt with their own more pathetic version of Donald Trump, we're diving deep into Kevin O'Leary. his past, his present, and the two people he did not kill with his boat. You guys got the great Canadian on a few weeks ago, the incredible Naomi Klein,

and now you get the bad Canadian. How is that for an intro? Emma Vigland, welcome back to the show. And I really think if I'm going to put a bad Canadian at the top of my list, it's hard to imagine O'Leary wouldn't at the very least be in the top three. But hello, Matt Bernstein. As always, good to see you, my dear. Emma, I'm so happy that you're back.

I hope I'm not like gilting you into doing this with me. But, and I told you this privately, I was out and about this past weekend, Memorial Day weekend. And I had multiple gay guys come up to me and say that they listen to my podcast, which thank you so much. And that they specifically loved when I do things with you. And I was like texting Emma every time this happened to me. And I was like, just saying, in case you want to come back, the gay guys really like you. Well, I come on because, one, I think you do phenomenal work, and I love to be able to contribute to it when I can, but also because I just adore spending time with you. And the more that you do this kind of work, the more you realize that podcasting can also substitute for social interaction.

So since we're not hanging out this week, we might as well talk about the shark tank dude. Have you been following any of Kevin O'Leary's latest exploits before we get into his life? I have. I have been following his lecturing of young people who have to spend more money on lunch than he deems morally acceptable. And I've specifically been following the construction of this AI data center, which is absolutely egregious and is resulting in a real grassroots opposition to O'Leary's project. which is why he's been using some horrific tactics that I'm sure we'll get into to go after the organizers in the state itself. The more that I learned about Kevin O'Leary over the last week as I prepared for this, the more I realized that this is a good episode to make because Kevin O'Leary, he's like a stand-in

of every rich person and the lies that they tell everyone else about how they became rich. and also the lies about how they can become rich. Like everything, everything he says is a lie. Everything he says is a lie. He is such a scammer. He's scammed continuously throughout his entire life. He's rich because he's a scammer. He is not rich because of all of the things that he says he's rich for.

And he can't be honest about that because the truth of the matter is under capitalism, there's not to like spoil my thesis too quickly, but there's only room for so many Kevin no theories. Like, we can't all be successful scammers because then there's no one to scam, which is why he has to make up a story about how he's actually rich and how you could be rich too, because you can't actually do what he does because then there would be no room for him to do it. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I was going to say that I think he really epitomizes the myth of the endless growth fantasy in capitalism. And AI data centers are a real, really big part of that. the idea that there is endless profitability and we only need these plucky entrepreneurs to come up

with the right idea. Tech currently has grown to a place where there's no longer any capacity for growth. So they're pivoting to AI, these data centers that are destroying the environment and guzzling up people's water. And it's essentially a large scam. And I think, you know, Kevin O'Leary as a figurehead for that, in addition to the fact that he marks, marketed his services on television, much like our amazing president, Donald Trump, that I think you can draw a lot of parallels and you can see a lot of society's sickness through the eyes of this discount daddy warbox. Shall we get into his early life? Let's. Kevin O'Leary is born on July 9, 1954 in Montreal.

His mother, Georgette, was a small business owner and investor. his dad died when he was seven. Kevin calls Georgette the most influential person in his life and credits her with teaching him how to invest. And here is where we start to get into very quickly some of the mythology that Kevin O'Leary tells about himself. Because every person like this has a sort of mythos that they just repeat over and over and over and over and over and over again

in podcasts, in interviews, in books. And this begins with the claim that Georgette, his mother, invested a portion of every paycheck she ever earned into stocks. Now, there's variations on this story. I found a Facebook post from him that said it was 10% of every paycheck, a LinkedIn video from him where she said it was 15% of every paycheck. She would take 15% of her salary and invest it. And a tweet from him where he said it was, 20% of every paycheck. She took 20% of her paycheck each week and invested it.

Mother, she'd always invests a third of her paycheck. I learned so much from my mother about how I conduct myself. She said this to me, always tell the truth, and you'll never have to remember what you said. Now, there's obviously like some bullshitting clearly happening there, but the concept of save a little bit of every paycheck you get is, I think, fine advice. Like my parents have also always given me that advice. most of his financial advice, which we will get further into stems from this, which again isn't bad, but it also just relies on the assumption that people have 10 to 20% of each paycheck

available to save, which is just increasingly not the reality. 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. There have been analyses about how much money the 935 billionaires in the United States made in just the last year. They now have a combined wealth total of over $8 trillion, and we're at levels of incoming wealth inequality that exceed the gilded age. And so, yeah, it's a little bit difficult for younger people to put away that amount of their paycheck when increasingly the cost of living is getting worse and worse.

People are putting more and more on credit. And you have old guys like this lecturing to you about your individual choices when your choices are entirely limited, if not non-existent. Yeah. We'll get into more of it. But again, it's just like so much of his financial advice, it reminds me a lot of like, have you ever been on like landlord TikTok? I don't engage with TikTok.

and I'm, as you know, a bit of an old woman at a heart, so you're going to have to educate me. I mean, I also don't go on a lot of TikTok, except to look at these people who do scams because I think it's fascinating. But there's a whole portion of TikTok that's people encouraging other people to become landlords as a sort of get-rich-quick scheme.

And the basis of their advice always starts with, like, just put $100,000 down on a building. And then they go on from there. But it's like, wait a second, how'd you get $100,000? Yes, right. And the self-help stuff from him, that is just one thing I want to touch on really quickly.

Self-help, for the most part, is immensely right-wing-coded because there's no collectivist understanding that is embedded in the analysis, and it is rife with scammers because you can convince a lot of individual atomized people that all they need to do is make the choices that his mommy made,

or you've got to just cut down on your swing, wheat green or whatever and you'll be rich just like me. But as we're going to be getting into in this podcast, to be just like Kevin O'Leary would mean to abandon a lot of moral principles and to be one of the luckiest people over the past how many decades. His mythology goes further. When I announced that I was thinking about making this episode, I got a message from a Canadian listener and they were like, please talk about the ice cream shop story. Do you know the ice cream shop story? I do not.

There were a few things that I chose not to read through in the outline because this just seemed too delicious, no pun intended, for me to eat alone. Stupid. It's so dumb. Okay. Okay. Kevin O'Leary has this origin story that he has told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It's about something that happened when he worked for one day at an ice cream shop in high school. Every entrepreneur I've ever talked to that finds himself where I am today has a defining moment where they are pushed into this path. It's something they can remember, and they remember it in perpetuity.

And I'll remember my moment getting fired in an ice cream store. That's simple. First day on the job, asked to serve and scoop ice cream. And I did that all day. But when people sample ice cream, they get a taster and they take their gum out and they throw it on the floor. Somebody's got to scrape the gum off the floor at the end of the day. I only took that job because I was very interested in a girl who was working in the shoe store. And I figured I could, you know, hang out with her afterwards.

And I saw her waiting for me. And the woman who owned the store said, you've got to scrape the gum off the floor. And I didn't want her to see me on my knees with a scraper. bad for my brand. I was in high school. And she said, no, no, you have to do it. And I said, you know, you hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. She said, how about you're fired? And I didn't know what that meant. And it was the defining moment for me because I realized there's two kinds of people in the world. There's people that own the store. And there's people that scrape the shit off the floor. And you have to decide who you are. Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. That was the lesson that he

took from that story. was the lesson that he took from that story, that there's two types of people in the world. There's people who own the store and people who scrape the shit off the floor. There's two types of people in the world. Those that own the store and those that scrape the shit off the floor. There are people who own the store and there are people who scrape the shit off the floor. So I learned that day that there are two types of people out there. There's people that scrape the shit off the floor and there's the people that own the store. I want it to be the guy that owned the store.

I dig that. Okay. So instead of having empathy for workers, he realized, huh, this is a hierarchy, and I want to get on the other side of the hierarchy so I can be directing people to scrape stuff off the floor and not be humiliated in front of this girl that I like for having to do such degrading work. First of all, I have worked in the ice cream store. I worked at it in my hometown one summer. and there is not a large staff typically at ice cream stores. You're scooping ice cream and you're also scraping shit off the floor when the doors close and when it's time for closing. I'm not sure exactly what differentiation he's making there, but I guess his stratification is the business owner and then the scraper. There's no in between, according to him.

Well, so I have a couple clarifying questions here that actually aren't about the moral of the story, quick interlude. First of all, to any Canadian listeners, is it typically pronounced ice cream? Because in every version of this that he tells, he always says, I was hired to scoop ice cream. I was working in an ice cream store. And so I got a job as a scooper, scooping ice cream. First day on the job asked to serve scoop ice cream. It was my second day working there. And the owner had hired me to scoop ice cream. Ice cream. I mean, if he's screaming for ice cream, that would make sense. But ice cream. Ice cream. cream for ice cream. I don't know.

Place the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Kevin Oleri. But then the other question that I had, and this, I could just be in the dark about this, but he always tells this story, and he's like, it was common for everyone who ordered a sample to spit their gum on the

floor. Is that something that happens a lot? I don't know. Was he in some sort of bar at 2 a.m.? Was everyone just really horrible at this specific ice cream store. I mean, I don't doubt that he was asked to scrape gum off the floor, but he did make it sound like this was happening frequently enough for there should have been like someone hired to just scrape shit off the floor. And I said to the owner of

the store, you hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. You hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. And I said, no, you hired me as an ice cream scooper, not a scraper. Well, it sounds like he's trying to over-emphasize the degrading nature of wage work. And speak. about being a business owner as the privileged position that it is. Now, he's fetishizing it, and he's reifying horrible hierarchies that have put us in the position of, as I mentioned, untold incoming wealth inequality. But it's a way for him to, I guess, reify the class differences that he so wanted to exacerbate, but just be on the other side of. It's incredible to tell that story and the defining feature of it be, I chose to abandon any empathy that was right in front

my face and proceed to be like, no, I just want to be the person doing this to other people. I know the term spiritually Israeli is very overused online, but there really is something spiritually Israeli about this to me. Israel is, of course, founded on and upheld by exploiting the trauma of the Holocaust and the belief that Jews need this like highly fortified armed lethal ethno states that we can dominate rather than be dominated. Zionist view this dynamic that you're either an oppressor or oppressed as like the natural and unchangeable order of things. And I think what Kevin O'Leary is describing is like the same thing. He's like you're either scraping shit off the floor in humiliation with like horrible working conditions and an abusive boss or you are the abusive.

boss. So I set out to be the abusive boss. And the comments on these videos are always just like inspiring. Yes, I know. That could be me too. I'm definitely not a sheep. And it's not going to work out for you. That's the part about the self-help scamming element, which is you were kind of touching on who is this appealing to as he speaks in these terms. It's to people who have already made it, who want to have almost like visual and emotional evidence that they are in the superior class and that everybody that was unable to achieve what they have achieved, like the great Kevin O'Leary, has made choices and made decisions that make them inferior to Kevin O'Leary.

I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to our friends over at Belessa. Belessa is a by-women for everybody spicy toy company that has been supporting my work on Instagram for a very, very long time. And this week, we are supporting you. Because this week, Balesa and I are giving away free spicy toys and gift cards to each and every one of you. If you want it, I'm not going to force you. If you're not familiar with Bolesa, they are perhaps best known for their viral rose suction toy and for their whisper collection, their iconic Whisper Collection, the first collection of completely silent vibrators. You worried about your roommates hearing you? Not anymore, my friend. Belessa also, and this isn't related to the

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slash fruity. That's B-B-V-I-B-E-S-com slash fruity. Thank you so much to Balesa for sponsoring this episode and now let's get back to the show. Shall we talk about some of the amazing decisions that Kevin O'Leary makes to accrue his very ethical wealth? I would like to.

As it goes, Kevin O'Leary initially wants to be a photographer, which I also started my career wanting to be a photographer. People didn't know that. Building bridges between Kevin and I. But his father, like many fathers, told him basically to get real. So he decides to go into business, take his passion for investing, at least the one that he claims to have had as a result of his mother. Kevin gets a bachelor's degree in environmental studies, something he would disregard completely later on in his career and then he got his master's at business school. While at business school, he had an

internship at Nabisco, the cookie company. He briefly works in TV production and helps co-found special event television, a sports programming network, which he later sells his share of for $25,000. In 1986, and this is where things really get going, so I'm going to need everyone to lock in. Sorry, I sound like a, I don't know, I sound like a tick, I'm like lock in. I'm like lock in. I don't know, trying too hard. You got way too straight there. Lock in, bro. In 1986, Kevin O'Leary starts Soft Key, which is a computer software company, which becomes a catalyst for his success.

The way Kevin O'Leary tells it is like, I was just living in my mom's basement and I started this company that I ended up selling for $4 billion. Did you know Kevin O'Leary built a $3.7 billion empire from his basement using a simple $3.7 billion. step formula. And he uses this story, of course, to prop himself up and to, you know, venture capital royalty, shark tank, dragons den, becomes a TV personality. He's written three books based off of it called Cold Hard Truth on Business, Money and Life, the Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money, and the Cold Hard Truth on Family, Kids, and Money. Can we pause there for just a quick second to take a look at these titles? I mean, if you're buying this book, you're a sucker at this point. I mean, the way that it looks, it looks like a scam. And I'm not trying to disparage anybody that's trying to make

their way in the world. But man, this is like the bus stop ads for lawyers, but just in book form, this guy's a self-marketer. That's his greatest skill. Where have we heard that before? Yes, exactly. And if he was just like, if he was just rich because he was so good at business, he wouldn't have to be also like writing a book series and doing multiple television shows and on the news every day. Like so much of Kevin O'Leary's wealth comes from propagating his image of a wealthy person. Yes. Like Kevin O'Leary has never been a billionaire, but he wants everyone to think that he's a billionaire. You know what I mean?

Yes. And the fact that two of those titles include family slash women, like, 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. 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. A lot of this is like masculine oriented Mel Robbins.

Yes. Like, 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. 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. My family was not religious, but I know that there are a lot of Christians in this country that listen to those kinds of people. And it should not be a shock to you that Trump is essentially a prosperity gospel idol in that he is the kind of person that takes the place of religious idolatry. And he did that by presenting himself as a capitalistic deity to an ultimate. audience that was already primed to worship both wealth and power, they're sheep. And that's the same audience that O'Leary is after. Not to be too disparaging, but I mean, come on, baby. It's like yes and no. I try to keep the blame on these figures because ultimately, like, they're just propagating

the system that turns these consumers into sheep. Like, they're just so desperate. I know. They're so desperate. I know. I don't know. No, you're right. And you sound like me, like two or three years ago when I spent a little less time with Sam. I keep going. Anyway, this story about Kevin O'Leary building Softkey, the software company in his mom's basement and then selling it a few years later for $4 billion, is technically a true story, but contains, my dear, so very many holes. The first being that he started that company with a $10,000 investment from, can you guess who?

Um, his mom. His mom. How did you know? Because it's the most self-aggrandizing way that he could potentially describe his origin story. And that's when the tie goes to the runner, the tie goes to the braggard. He recently made a video on Instagram. I'm going to try to find it because I was scrolling through his Instagram this morning. But he was like, the fastest way to make a million dollars, your first million dollars is to make your first $10,000.

The fastest way to make a million dollars is to make. the first 10,000. And I was thinking, man, wouldn't it also be nice if you had a mom that gave that to you? Right. I love that. Make it by having a mom that loves you. Unlike you, you pathetic, poor person. It reminds me so much there's this meme. It's this person made up of all these puzzle pieces and there's just one missing. It's captioned like sometimes what a person needs is just the one missing piece. And then off in the distance, the puzzle piece is just labeled generational wealth. That's the one piece that you're missing. That's exactly right.

Anyway, Soft Key begins focusing on educational software, and by 1993, seven years after its founding, is a publicly traded company with revenues of $110 million, but is operating nonetheless at a loss of $57 million. dollars. Soft Key went on to acquire other educational technology companies, two of which, by the way, were called by Dartmouth's Tucker School of Business, quote, two of the 10 worst U.S. acquisitions during 1994 to 1996 as measured by shareholder value. It was a lot of like shady and bad business, which came to his head after Soft Key put in a bid for a San Francisco based company called the Learning Company, or TLC, not to be confused with the television network. TLC, in the process of being acquired by Softkey, hired a forensic accounting firm to investigate Softkey's financial health, and the firm found that Softkey may have overstated its

earnings by bundling various general and administrative costs into its write-offs. In any case, Softke's acquisition of TLC went through, and Softkey adopted the TLC name. So Kevin O'Leary's big company at this point is called TLC now. TLC continues to grow and its revenues reach $800 million. But is it making a profit? I would guess that it's not. And I have some thoughts in general about educational software that I'll jump into after you're done. So this is a quote from a 2012 article called Kevin O'Leary. He's not a billionaire. He just plays one on TV written in Globe and Mail Canada. It's a very good long form article that you should go and read if you're curious about what happened with this business. While O'Leary says in his memoir,

cold hard truth, that TLC was a money-making machine, an SEC filing shows that TLC suffered net losses of $376 million in 1996, $495 million in 1997, and $105 million in 1998. TLC's accumulated deficit topped $1.1 billion by the end of 1998. I mean, how can you not respect that business acumen there, Matt? Don't you love capitalism and how fair it is? Do you want to put in your two cents about educational software before I tell you what happens? 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-com bubble that I know that Kevin O'Leary was very much a part of. At the very least in Bill Gates's case, he did a complete takeover of education in many parts of the country. And there has been an analysis of that takeover and that privatization showing that learning standards went down. And that really, it turns out teachers knew best. And it was more important to have things like, you know, adaptive learning and educational policy that was more tailored to the students as opposed

to this push that like technology has to be involved. It seems like O'Leary rode that wave, but it really was a wave of privatizing education. And it was bipartisan, unfortunately, that is hopefully no longer in vogue. But, you know, you have existing politicians in the Democratic Party right now that still were very much a part of that push. I think Cory Booker comes to mind from New Jersey. This was a giant scam in and of itself. And it looks like O'Leary's participation in the broader scam was a scam within the scam, a Russian doll, if you will. Yes. And by the way, and I'm just going to say really quick, everything that I'm saying is alleged because, uh, well, it's alleged, however, you might be wondering, like, how can you have, like, revenues of $800 million

with a software company and still be losing so much money? And one of the things that was eventually uncovered was that TLC, a Kevin O'Leary's company, it would, at the end of a quarter, to, at the end of a financial quarter, to really boost its revenue numbers up, it would repackage a lot of unsold merchandise and send it out to be sold in drugstores. And, would mark those sales as revenue. But then, after the quarter came to a close and they had reported it as revenue, a lot of that merchandise ended up getting returned because no one was buying it. Yes, it was the dot-com bubble time, and they were buying anything that would come in front of

them that had some sort of shiny tech branding associated with it. So O'Leary is a scammer, it appears, but it also appears like the purchaser did not do their due diligence. once again, the myth of meritocracy under capitalism, just exploding before our very eyes. Speaking of purchasers not doing their do dilat do do. In 1998, Mattel, the toy company, put in a bid to acquire TLC believing that educational software was the future.

Mattel purchased TLC for about $4 billion in the spring of 1999. O'Leary took over as president of Mattel's new TLC Digital Division. His salary increased to $650,000 a year, and his severance package grew to $5.2 million. A few months after the sale went through, O'Leary sold almost all of his stock in the company and made immediately around $6 million. And if you think this sounds a lot like insider trading,

I can't say whether or not you're right, but you can think what you want. Coincidences happen every day. Coincidence happens every day. It's all alleged, Kevin. In the third quarter of 1999, Mattel initially announced that it expected a 50 million profit from TLC. Upon realizing the company they acquired was actually collapsing, they revised that estimate to a loss of between $50 and $100 million, which wiped out $2 billion of shareholder value, in one day. The actual Q3 loss ended up being $105 million, and the following quarter,

the loss was $206 million. That November of 1999, Mattel fired Kevin O'Leary six months into a three-year contract. And finally, in 2000, one year after the acquisition went through, they sold it for around $27 million. Business Week called Mattel's purchase of T's one of the worst deals of all time. Mattel shareholders launched a class action lawsuit accusing Kevin O'Leary of insider trading and obscuring the actual health of TLC, which Mattel eventually settled by paying out $122 million to shareholders. But in the end, it didn't really matter for Kevin. He made roughly $11 million between his severance package and the sale of his Mattel stock.

So essentially, he took a... pile of crap, put a bow on it, sold it to Mattel, got out when he could, left the rest of the shareholders with the bag as well as the purchaser of his software, and then has decided to market himself as a business genius. Now, that's not necessarily too far afield from the truth. Everything under capitalism, I would argue, requires some level of scamming. I mean, the fact that workers don't own the means of production for the products that they produce and put their labor into is a scam in and of itself. At least there should be some sort of hybrid model where workers have a part of the company in a way that isn't so disproportionately oriented, I think, also towards financialization and towards that being stock options. It's about like the physical product that's being produced.

but I digress. He is a scammer, allegedly. It appears like he is now selling that as something that other people should replicate. And the reality is that this dot-com bubble, this period where all of this kind of software was being purchased, was really the result of a lot of luck. And it doesn't seem like his product was very good. He just rode the wave of the dot-com bubble cashed out and kind of left everybody to be screwed over. And that's not replicable, especially. especially because he only was able to start this with $10,000 fucking dollars from his mom. Exactly. His rich mom. I mean, look, I grew up with a certain amount of privilege with parents that are both lawyers. It gave me a head start in life. It allowed me to not have student debt, which so many of my friends and family members have to deal with. It allowed me to live at home for a year when I was making a very low wage when I first got my media career start at TYT.

and Soak was able to save up to get an apartment, you can acknowledge those things and still say, hey, I'm lucky to be in the position that I'm in. And yet, guys like Kevin O'Leary do the exact opposite. They create media ecosystems that are supposedly about empowering other people when in reality it's creating a misperception that this level of wealth is achievable if you just put your mind to it. That's right. the fact that he's even like a shark tank guy where like nothing as you say nothing that he did to actually accrue his wealth is replicable least of all through in a sort of like organic thoughtful

entrepreneurship and speaking of which i want to i was going to say this for later but there's a video that i found on his instagram that i saved and i want to show you it this is actually the one where he's talking about the fastest way to make a million dollars the fastest way to make a million is to make the first 10,000. That's really how it works. But really, it's not about anything else except focusing on what people want and how to

solve their problems. People get wealthy, not pursuing money out of greed, but pursuing a passion around a problem-solving exercise. That's what business is all about. People don't want to walk around with bare feet, so they buy shoes. It's a simple

outcome, isn't it? So think about that. Try and find something it's a pain point that you know everybody has and then provide the product or service that solves for that. That's how you make a million. That's how you make five million. That's how you make a hundred million. That's how you make a billion. People don't like walking around barefoot. Just invent shoes. That was simple. Did he say a pain point at the end? A pain point, yeah. Just interesting. His support for Donald Trump, his support for capitalism that is unfettered, there are a lot of things that are pain points for people, having a home or not having a home, being able to have a roof

over your head. That's a point of pain. Should that be exploited by the market? Your ability to pay for your cancer treatment. That's a point of real pain. Should that be exploited by the market? These are the questions that should be asked of somebody who espouses this ideology. It's also, I mean, I don't want to belabor the point too much, but like finding a hole in the market, which is what all of these like entrepreneur influencers say is like the first thing that you have to do, which like Kevin O'Leary is ultimately like an influencer. Again, it just bears repeating over and over again as many times as he repeats the lies that he is lying. He didn't become rich by finding a hole in the market.

There wasn't a hole in the market for the thing that he created. So he inflated the worth of the company, sold it for a million dollars, well, actually four billion dollars, made out like a bandit and then had everyone else sort of cover up the mess. Like, it's just a lie. And this is why I think this episode is good, because that is the case for basically everyone who is that rich. know people are going to take issue with that and find like, oh, no, I know the guy who invented the granola bar. Okay, congratulations. But like, 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. 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. It's a chicken or the egg situation. The end result is largely immaterial. It means that we should not allow people to accrue this kind of wealth and we should be able to tax the hell out of them if they get to that point because that level of wealth inherently involves exploitation regardless of the intentions from the outset, which I don't believe. But if you want to take them in the best faith interpretation, it doesn't matter. We're not talking about your moral character.

We're talking about how we structure a society. And no person should have that level of wealth because of the amount of power that it gives to them. It's undemocratic in addition to being exploitative just from an economic sense. Kevin now with his $10 plus million dollars goes on to, become an investor. He becomes a venture capitalist. He invests in some things that work and he invests in some things that don't work. But at this point, he has kind of so much money that the money itself just sort of compounds. In 2003, he clearly wanting to be some sort of influencer, which I think in common with Donald Trump and a lot of these other figures, he's always wanted to be on TV.

He reaches out directly to a Canadian television producer. He's like, I think I would be great on TV. Props to Kevin, a cold call. And he gets on TV. He's first on this show called Squeeze Play, but then he really comes into the limelight, at least in Canada, after being cast on Dragonsden, a TV show where aspiring entrepreneurs

pitched their business to a panel of venture capitalists. This show is, of course, adapted for the U.S. a shark tank in 2009, which O'Leary was brought onto. producers have always liked the way that he can play an asshole on TV and seemingly off of TV as well. This isn't really an episode about Shark Tank. I don't have that much to say about Shark Tank.

I had a phase watching Shark Tank. I feel like probably most people have had some phase where they're like, it's 10 p.m. And I'm on a weeknight, and I'm eating microwavable mac and cheese on the couch and like Shark Tank's on. So I'm going to watch 16 episodes of Shark Tank. You know, I enjoyed it.

Fine. I think I initially watched it to support Bethany Frankel, who was girl boss capitalizing and capitalisming. And at the time, I was obsessed with her. I look back on that obsession differently. God, if we could do a Housewives episode, I don't know what I would do with myself. What happened with Bethany Frankel? I'm not really a Housewives person. I mean, there's nothing really to say. It's just that like I've grown out of thinking the Girl Boss like feminism thing and her also kind of ridiculous self mythologizing. is anything of value, but God, to her seasons of Real Housewives of New York still hit, season seven through 11, baby, it's the literal peak of television. I'm taking us too far afield. This is why the gay men love you. That's good to hear. No, I mean, I had a phase with Shark Tank. Like, it was entertaining.

I think eventually it started to feel like a little gross. Whatever. You could say, like, I'm being too woke about it because this is how, like, investing works. And, like, you do have to pitch your ideas to rich people. But like I think at a certain point, especially as like the world reaches like where we are today with wealth inequality, with like basic health and human services, not being available to people watching this sort of like monopoly man panel and watching like oftentimes poor people just like beg and then be brutalized by someone like Kevin O'Leary on TV. To me it just started to feel like icky, I guess. It really fit in as we're going to draw a lot of parallels to Donald Trump. in with The Apprentice as a early 2000s reality show

that was about a wealthy boss who understood things, whether it's a panel of capitalists on Shark Tank or Trump and his family himself, that performed this for television, and it allowed people who didn't have economic circumstances that have empowered them to visualize themselves, in the role of the boss or the person that's deciding whether or not this pitch for the Shark Tank panel is something that is viable. It's entertainment that places you in the power

position when our economy has so thoroughly disempowered those people. Every person that comes on to Shark Tank has infinitely more in common with the rest of us than we do with the 0.01% that would be making determinations based on investment. And yet what this television programming has given to people is the vicarious experience of living in the position of being the boss in a time when that's been so thoroughly stolen from them. That is the best analysis of Shark Tank I've ever heard. Thank you so much.

In fairness, I haven't heard that many analyses of Shark Tank, but that was a really good one. Should I start a video essay, channel. I mean, honestly, that's like a dream of mine that I've never really been able to achieve. But those video essays, gosh, I mean, you know, with all your editing and stuff like that, it's tough. I was going to say, we're halfway there with a bit fruity. I really hate that show at this point, because even like the nice one is Mark Cuban. And like, I can't even stand Mark Cuban anymore. Mark Cuban just sold the Dallas Mavericks, which he said was like his greatest love in life to

Miriam Adelson. Wow. If people don't know who Miriam Adelson is. Trump's one of his top donors, mega Zionist donor. Her husband, Sheldon Adelson,

has died that he funded a right-wing paper in Israel. She continues to support it. She wants the entire West Bank essentially annexed by the state of Israel and did a quid pro quo

with Trump to allow for that to happen. She donated $100 million to his last re-election effort. 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.

There you fucking go. I want to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to the American Humanist Association for supporting this episode. I was so grateful that the American Humanist Association continues to want to work with this show because their value system is so organically aligned with my own. Humanism is fundamentally about living ethically. It's about living in community with other people who you care about, and it is about valuing evidence over dogma,

valuing science, over religion, and creating legislation that prioritizes that as an ethic. The American Humanist Association is an organization that works to materially protect us from laws that value religion over people. And if that's a battle that resonates with you, I would love for you to check them out at humanist.org slash fruity. You can learn more about what they're up to, and if you feel so inclined and able,

you can make a donation. No donation, of course, is too small, and you'd be shocked at what $5 can do. When you send $5 to the AHA, you are directly funding legal work that protects our right to live under a government that doesn't use religion when it makes laws. Your funding policy work that helps strike down bills that would otherwise target marginalized communities. And this is work that Lord knows we need it right now.

So big shout out to the AHA. Thank you for sponsoring this episode. And now let's get back to the show. I want to take a beat and talk about some of Kevin O'Leary's personal, finance advice. And I want to start with one clip that has made the rounds recently and that I mentioned up top. Let's listen to it. Can't stand it when I see kids that are making 70 grand a year, spending $28 for lunch. I mean, that's just stupid. It's just think about that in the context of that being put into an index and making 8 to 10% a year for the next 50 years. Emma, why would you eat

lunch? Why would you eat lunch when you could invest that lunch money? Skinny. All right. Yeah. First of all, not a ton of body positivity from Kevin O'Leary there. We're doing the avocado toast thing, I guess. That's right. I mean, come on.

We've grown up with this at this point. Yeah, it's not a problem that food prices are so insane and that wages have fallen below the pace of inflation. And by the way, you have an administration that O'Leary supports that's telling you that you have to control your health through your individual consumption choices. And that's the only thing we're offering to you is some advice about, I don't know, seed oil and the amount of meat and vegetables that you should consume. Make that decision yourself, but also make sure that you skip lunch and get the hot dog from the vendor that's a few bucks or get the Big Mac as opposed to the salad that we're telling you that you need to eat to make yourself healthy, but also don't eat it because if you do so,

it's your problem for not making smart and financial investments. Thank you to to the boomer class and the capitalist class for giving us such sage advice. Can you explain? Like, because a lot of people listening are probably either like too old or too young to know what I'm calling is the millennial avocado toast fallacy. Yes. I grew up with it a little. You're a few years older than me, so you definitely were like in the heart of that.

All right. Sorry. You're actually my, we're the same age. I'm 19. Um, yeah. Because this is the millennial avocado toast fallacy just recycled for gen. for Gen Z. Wait, so you're like at the beginning of Gen Z, right? I'm at the end of millennial. I think that's how it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm right on the cusp. I'm 98. So I don't know, people can put me

where they want. 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 and stop spending all of this money on avocado toast. Which, by the way, at the time, it was like $11. Oh my God. Now it's like $16 for an avocado toast. Well, this is the thing. It's like it's the same fallacy, but with the number pumped up to 28 because like that's how much lunch is now. Well, I mean, one, again, if we want to bring it back to.

the Trump administration. Does O'Leary want to talk to him about the fact that he started this offensive criminal war with Iran that has driven up fertilizer prices to the point where everybody's food is going to continue to go up? It doesn't matter what part of the world that you're in. There's a disproportionate amount of fertilizer that is made from byproducts that come from oil and gas. And a large portion of that comes through the Strait of Ormoos. So it's not just going to be your gas prices that go up. It's your food prices too. And O'Leary is trying to say, And this is where, you know, conservatives, you can put a pin in their arguments or you can flag them when you see how they're trying to disempower you politically. Because that's what he's trying to do. Don't look at the systemic reasons. Don't look at capitalism.

Don't look at all the tax cuts to the wealthy that have occurred for decades, the regulatory framework that Reagan and the conservatives have gutted for decades. Don't look at the fact that we've taken the chains off of corporations so they can charge you whatever you want. make it about your individual consumption choices. And that makes people look less collectively and turn inwardly. And so for all the talk on the right about these mental health issues and why do young men feel disempowered by society? I don't know. Maybe because the entire crop of influencers that are telling them how to be a man or how to make money in the society are specifically skirting the systemic issues. that have led to their emissoration and are more focused on blaming individuals for their circumstances

because this is not the actual audience, right? Like, I just want people to be clear about that. From the avocado toast phenomenon on Fox News that spread elsewhere to this talking point from Kevin O'Leary. This is about being a bedtime story for grandpa watching Fox News. That's right. This is about him being pissed that his non-binary granddaughter talks back to him at Thanksgiving. or non-binary you get what I'm saying,

grandchild. You know, non-binary grandadine. It's a bedtime story for already existing rich old white men. And the self-help stuff is a very thin veneer. But the people that do get dragged into it, I feel for them because they're being

misled and they're not necessarily seeing what their power is. And it's a self-soothing story for Kevin O'Leary as well. Because once again, he did not become rich by doing the things that he's telling us to do. He did not become rich by what, getting a cheaper lunch and then setting aside the money than he would have spent on a sweet green and instead investing it and letting the wealth grow over time. And now he has a $10 million

chalet second home on a lake somewhere. That's not, he did it by scamming people. Yep. And what is a scam if not saying you're the sucker and I'm the exploiter? And there's not enough exploiters to suckers in the ratio to make this an actual viable path for advice for other people. And I also just have to say, like, maybe there are places in probably more like rural or suburban in the middle of the country areas where $28 is like a nice lunch. But if you live in one of the cities that Kevin O'Leary, no doubt, thinks that young people should live in if they want to get the best jobs, $28 is sweet green and a can of seltzer. Absolutely. This is fast casual pricing.

So essentially what he's saying is like any form of like not packing yourself a sandwich in a brown paper bag is luxury that young people should not be partaking in if they ever want to own a house, which is just crazy. It's just crazy. Especially when you look at home prices and you look at how disproportionately they're being held on to by people who have owned that property for so long. They're probably not even paying a mortgage on it. And they probably had an interest rate of like two or three percent. And so there's just not enough housing anymore. 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.

But yeah, it's your lunch. It's your lunch. But Kevin O'Leary's advice for us doesn't end with food. He's also graciously offered advice on what clothes we should be. buying. Here's Kevin. My mother Georgette taught me, and this really probably flows into why I buy these watches, don't buy crap. She used to only buy one Chanel jacket a year, but a really good one. She loves Chanel. And when she died, there was a cat fight for her clothing amongst the women and my family, because they were now vintage Chanel's that were worth way more than what she paid

for them. So she really, so most people, you go look in your closet, it's full of crap, you don't need. You bought crap that you just don't wear. You wore it once and it's just crap. Don't buy the crap. Buy the good stuff and just buy less of it. I would love to see his mother's dry cleaning bill. I mean, the more that I listened to this man over the last week, the more it crystallized to me that his mother was fucking rich. And that's fine. But does Kevin O'Leary know what a Chanel jacket cost. Do you know what a Chanel jacket costs? As a tomboy, I'm going to guess

Chanel jacket's like $2,000. Oh, Emma. No. I'm not into clothes in fashion. I'm really that's a lot of money. Do you think a Chanel jacket cost $2,000 today? Yes, that was my guess.

Oh, I was going to say, like maybe in the 60s or 70, no, maybe they're little less than $2,000 then. If you take a scroll on Chanel's website, as I did. Okay. Chanel.com. Is that where I go? I'm just going to do this in real time.

What does hot couture mean? I love the gender role reversal we get to do, though. It's fun. It's fun. Yeah. I mean, like, look, yeah, my personality, I've never been into the fashion. There's no way for me to even look at prices. It's just photos.

Can you just tell me more? Okay. Well, that's because you're in the... a hoketore section. What does that even mean? Okay, hoketor. It's basically when the fashion house designs specifically for a person. There are only, I think, like 4,000 people around the world who are rich enough to be customers of hoketor. You have like a direct relationship with the fashion house. Don't ask me how I know this. Clearly, I'm not one of those customers. But I mean, look, You were talking fashion the other night when we went out to dinner, and I had no idea what you were talking about then.

So you're educating me. I've been working on it ever since they crucified me. Anyway, I mean, hokotore, that's not even what we're talking about, but that can be like hundreds of thousands of dollars for an outfit. But ready to wear. If we just look at ready to wear, which still on hundreds of thousands of dollars for an outfit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Ready to wear, which is the things that like if you went into a Chanel store and you saw a jacket and you.

and you were like, I'd love this in a medium or whatever. Like, that's ready to wear. That's like they've made it. It's ready to wear off the rack. I went to the Chanel website because I was like, these things kind of get more expensive every year. What's the going rate? The most sort of like basic standard Chanel jacket that I have clicked on

that you would think of when you think of a Chanel jacket is $13,350. Okay, I was pretty off. But I don't think Kevin O'Leary knows. is that. I don't think he cares. Exactly. It's a, it's a scam. He's just, I mean, who knows if this is even true about his mother? I have no idea if this is the case. Why would it matter? And the fact that he keeps invoking her in this business context feels like another scam in and of itself. I'm seeing if you got $28 lunches every day, would it equal one Chanel jacket? It would not.

It would be about $10,000. Wow. Keep your sweet green kids. But if you put it in some sort of investment vehicle after a year, if you skipped your sweet green, you could potentially, if the investment goes the right way and Trump doesn't crash the economy, save up enough for all of your mislunches to be one Chanel jacket that you can get dry cleaned every week or every day, potentially, because you don't have any other clothing. You could also just eat the jacket. Those fibers have got to be nutritious. I mean, how else can you justify that cause? Meanwhile, I'm like, should I spend $40 on this Nick sweatshirt that I really want? Jeez.

I should mention Kevin O'Leary briefly ran for leadership of Canada's conservative party. Do you know this? Yes, I did. All I know about it is that he, like, tried and failed to be, like, Canada's Trump. I think that they had some better conservative representation by, you know, Ford. But I'm not necessarily sure if I remember anything. anything more than this. Shout out to Canada. I know you guys would grill me if I didn't include that he had a sort of failed political run, but he still tries to, you know, influence politics

wherever he goes, including the United States, where he now lives in Miami Beach after a one boating incident. I'm going to tell you about the boating incident. And before I do so, I will tell you that in March 2025, a crypto influencer named Ben Armstrong accused Kevin O'Leary of murder and claimed that O'Leary had paid millions of dollars to cover up the boating incident. Kevin O'Leary responded with a defamation lawsuit and won approximately $2.8 million. So I would just like to once again make it very clear, I'm going to look into the camera, that the O'Leary's have never murdered anyone with their boat or paid to cover it up.

Any suggestion that they did is categorically false, and now I would like to tell the story of what happened in August of 2019. I would also say that the O'Leary's and never murdered anyone with their boat or paid millions to cover it up. Any suggestion that they did is categorically false. Shall we? Yeah. On the final Saturday of August 2019, Kevin O'Leary and his wife were at their idyllic estate on Lake Joseph. Lake Joseph is a tiny body of water in an exclusive cottage country region of Canada, about a two hours drive from Toronto.

The lake is surrounded by expensive summer homes, including the O'Leary's, a 10-bedroom, 11-bathroom, 9,800-square-foot mega- mansion. That's too big of a house to have for your vacation home. I'm sorry. You've got to max out in single-digit bedrooms. I'm done with this crap. They need extra rooms for all of Georgette's Chanel jackets that she didn't need. Across the lake that night, some of the O'Leary's wealthy friends were having a dinner party.

The O'Leary's decided to drive to said dinner party on their luxury speedboat, a cobalt bow rider. They stayed at that party until approximately 11 p.m. when it was time to boat home in the dark. Linda was driving and she'd been drinking, which her lawyers never disputed. But when she had the drinks was disputed, put a pin in that. She was also driving at a, quote, significant speed per police records, but the exact speed was never specified. Just got to say, girl bossing here and shout out to Kevin for being such a feminist that he allowed his wife to drive the boat in pitch black. He got to sit as a passenger. Well, I will say, after all of this went down, there was sort of like the rumor mill around like, did Kevin O'Leary throw his wife under the bus?

And was he actually driving? I believe that Linda was driving, but it's all alleged. Anyway, around the corner from them, also on the lake, another dinner party was being. hosted that night by Irv Edwards, a doctor and businessman. Edwards and 11 of his friends headed out on his speedboat to stargaze on the lake. Irv Edwards allowed his friend Richard Rue, a general physician from New York, to drive the boat that night. They drove the boat a little ways out from their house and stopped on the lake and turned

off their navigation lights so they could see the stars better. Passengers of that boat would later say that they actually turn the lights back on, the O'Leary's dispute this. They say the lights were totally off on that boat. Not seeing the Edwards boat due to some disputed combination of darkness, alcohol, and speed, the O'Leary's boat slammed into the front of the Edwards boat, then traveled up and over it. At the time, two people were stargazing on the front triangle section.

You know how the front of boats will have that little triangle where you can sit? There were two people sitting in that section of the boat. Susanna Brito, a 48-year-old mother of three, and Gary Paltash, a 68-year-old man from Florida. Pultash was killed on impact. Brito was knocked unconscious and later died in the hospital a few days later. Linda O'Leary injured her ankle, and Kevin was unhurt. O'F. Yeah.

Okay. There are way too many, just in terms of like the proportions, incidents of boating issues, while drinking with wealthy people, probably because wealthy people are more likely to have boats. But this feels like another incident where it's just another shady situation where people have been drinking and they decide to drive boats. And turns out that's still a motor vehicle and there are other people on these bodies of water. Yeah, that's right. After exchanging a few words between the O'Leary boat and the Edwards boat, the Edwards boat rushed back to shore for help while the O'Leary's continued to their nearby cottage. The O'Leary's son, Trevor, called 911 after the O'Leary's got home.

Wait, can I just ask you to clarify? So they went home. They didn't stay when they knew that they had crashed into this other boat, allegedly? Well, Kevin has been litigious about the claim that he fled. So I won't say that he fled the scene, but they did factually. go to their home after the collision occurred. They did not stay together. Okay. That is, I think, important information. Mm-hmm.

The police officer who arrived at their house smelled alcohol on Linda's breath and had her take a breathalyzer test, which revealed that her blood alcohol content was between 50 and 99 milligrams of alcohol per 100 mil liters of blood, which is bordering on the legal limit to drive a boat, or I believe a car, I think. it's the same thing, which is 80 milligrams.8. Is that the legal limit? I don't know. We live in 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 L.A., everyone is so, like, less of an alcoholic than us here in New York. It's like, because they have to think about driving. And we're like, all right, whatever,

on the subway. When the officer asked Linda what she had had to drink, Linda said that she had been served a vodka drink upon arriving home after the crash and couldn't remember who poured it. According to the O'Leary's son's friend, Linda said after she got home that she quote, needed a drink. I hesitate. I'm sorry to do another Real Housewives reference, but I'm not saying this is the exact same incident. Joe Judice once made the same claim after an incident in which there was a car that had been crashed and there had been drinking involved. Yes. You drink when you get home.

You definitely weren't drinking during the period where you were driving. No, that's a great connection because a lot of the articles that I read about this, they noted that this is a common tactic. And I'm not saying that Linda did or didn't do anything. But oftentimes when people are involved in a drunk driving incident or something like that, they'll drink after they get home once the police show up or at least say that that's when they were drinking to be like, well, no, I drank after. I wasn't drunk during. Right. At least say that. And we're, you know, that's what she said. That's what she said. Linda O'Leary was charged

with careless operation of a vessel. Richard Rue, who was driving the other boat, was charged with failing to display a navigation light. All three parties, the O'Leary's Richard Rue and Irv Edwards, denied responsibility for the crash. And after two years, Linda's charges were dropped because prosecutors couldn't meet the burden of proof to show that she was driving without proper care. Paula Brito, the sister of the late Susanna Brito, said, quote, 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 usually one to do a cop out of like, I think that there were multiple people at fault here.

What I do think, though, is that there were multiple people at fault here. I think that Linda O'Leary probably, maybe allegedly, had at least a drink in her at the time, perhaps allegedly. And, you know, she was probably driving faster than one should drive on a boat at nighttime when it's total darkness. And as they tell it, the other boat had no lights on at all, which seems to be the fault of the operator of the other boat, if true. I've read a lot of like forums from like boating people talking about this. And they're like, if the other person didn't have their lights on, then it's very, very, very hard to see the other boat. It seems like they were stargazing, which would make sense as to why they had the lights off so they could

see the stars. There have been other incidents, vehicular manslaughter that is not this. Of course, it's just another incident where there were charges, right? Where I can understand saying, like, we should differentiate between somebody who's maliciously killing somebody and somebody who does it by accident. I mean, Caitlin Jenner is an example of somebody who hit someone with their car. 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. 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. Wrongful death lawsuits were filed by the victim's families in the direction of both boat drivers. The claims of Brito's children who at the time of the crash were 12, 11, and 9 years old at the time. Alleged negligence in the operation of both boats resulting in the death. of their mother and sought damages for loss of guidance, care and companionship, loss of dependency, and loss of services. 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. Per Toronto Life magazine, quote, one of the O'Leary's wealthy neighbors said that the O'Learys felt they were being unfairly persecuted because of their wealth and fame. Oh, man. Yeah.

They're being discriminated against. It's a protected class. Don't you understand? The rich people who were able to have the means to boat in this elite area at this time of night are the victims for being put in this circumstance. The O'Leary's lawyered up. They retained Brian Greenspan, who's a famous celebrity lawyer. they also utilized Kevin O'Leary's agent, Jay Shores, who is the vice chairman of UTA,

one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood, United Talent Agency, to flood the press with Kevin's side of the story, which is the following. Quote, on a late night, I was a passenger in a boat that was involved in a tragic collision with another watercraft that had no navigation lights on and then fled the scene of the accident, saying the other boat fled the scene. I am fully cooperating with law enforcement and their investigation out of respect for the victim's families and to fully support the ongoing investigation. I feel it is inappropriate to make further comments at this time. My heartfelt prayers and condolences to the victims, the family, and those affected by this loss. I think it's interesting because one could plausibly read this and think that like the O'Leary's were the victims.

Isn't that the case kind of, I feel like when you have wealthy lawyers like that and it's these battles between wealthy people, I mean the Gwyneth, Peltroski incident comes to mind. That is the tactic that is most effective. They have the means from a legal perspective to fight back against endless claims. And so you are not going to take a more conciliatory approach as a defense attorney if you understand that you have the resources to engage in a protracted legal fight with the other side. So I feel like you disproportionately see this with wealthier people, the portrayal of them as a victim, as opposed to like, if you're poorer, you're going to have some sort of public defense lawyer that is going to say, hey, it might be time to settle or accept these kinds of charges for a lesser sentence.

Now, within months, the O'Leary's were back living large. They were doing their, like, rich person fundraiser dinners. Like, life kind of just continued on as normal. And in January of 2026, almost seven years. after the boat crash, they reached a settlement with the family of the victims. Now, we don't know everything about that settlement, but two of the Brito children who were still minors at the time the settlement was made, one of them, like so much time had passed that one of the kids had turned 18, the 12-year-old. But two of the children who were still minors, we know the details of their

settlement, which is that the O'Leary's paid each child $100,000 minus legal fees. And by the time the legal fees, prorated costs, taxes and fees were added and deducted to the various subtotals. Each child was given $72,538 and 56 cents, which is to be held by the court until they turn 18. Also, Alex Paltash, Gary's adult son, the other victim's adult son, started a go-fund me for the kids, which raised $25,000. So that's what they got. I got to say, for an incident that is that traumatic with that kind of loss, It feels like a bit of a pittance in terms of the settlement that was reached. Yes.

I just, you know, it is one thing for like an accident to go horribly, horribly wrong. Right. I'm with you. Like there is like memes about this boat crash and people are like, oh, Kevin O'Leary's a murderer. Kevin O'Leary's a murderer. Whatever. We can, we can, you in the comments can get into the alleged details of what allegedly happened.

But the thing that I think is very clear is that like the O'Leary's kind of said, you afterwards. Right. They could have offered a much larger sum than they initially were forced to agree to. And they probably, I don't know the details of their arrangement with their lawyer, but I'd imagine that they paid well over what they settled for each child on an annual basis just to fight it. And it goes to show, and I think you can see a lot of this in high profile wealthy legal battles, how immaterial the actual material elements of this are to the people involved. So much of our civil litigation when it comes to these, and this is in Canada, so I'm not fully understanding in terms of like their system or I don't have a great grasp on it. But just from the

egos of, you know, Western white, rich people, it's almost a sport for them to play this out in court as opposed to anything that's material because I would imagine that the O'Leary's could have saved a lot of money if they just decided, hey, we're going to give these kids this amount and it's going to be a lot more than we end up settling on, but we're going to just wash our hands of this and make sure we do the right thing. Yeah. They chose something different. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great takeaway. And my only other one, which is kind of the same one, is just that it's just like there's no justice in this system if you're up against someone with the money like Kevin O'Leary has. Clearly, it doesn't look like the families, or at least the Brito children in that family,

had the same resources as the two people driving the boats in the incident that killed her. And there's just no justice. There's just no justice. And that's another reason why I think Kevin O'Leary is a great stand-in for like every rich asshole because he kind of just hits all the beats. Well said. Well said. I really don't have too much to add to that, honestly.

Should we talk about the data center? Yes. So, if you haven't heard, Kevin O'Leary is currently a primary. developer of a massive data center in Box Elder County, Utah, called the Stratos AI Data Center. The data center would be one of the largest in the world. It would be roughly 62 square miles, aka 40,000 acres, aka two Manhattan's, aka 30,000 football fields. The data center would consume nine gigawatts of power, which I believe is currently more than twice as much as the entire state of Utah. Oh, yes, you are absolutely right about that for just the Kevin O'Leary data center more important than the entire topography and population of the state of Utah.

According to Utah Clean Energy, the data center would use 16.6 billion gallons of water per year to operate or 25,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a state, mind you, that has been plagued by drought for years. This is a fight that's happening across the country, and it's not just the Kevin O'Leary of it all, but I do think that his cartoonish kind of rich guy thing, plus the sheer scale and size of it, when you compare it to the overall ability of Utah to serve the people that live there in general, makes it such a stark example of how these data centers and the developers behind it are trying to sprint to, outpace the coming populist anger and rage about what these data centers are going to do to communities. And they're trying to undemocratically get ahead of the reaction by like other tech companies asking for permission after already doing something that is indelible and that is unchangeable and that the forces of capital are already behind it. So you have the snowballs momentum. By the way, no more snowballs, I guess, in Utah anymore. One of the top skiing locations in the country if this kind of thing goes through. It is in many ways an example of how the AI and these

tech companies are in a metaphorical sense. The house that we all live in, right, they're breaking into it. We've figured it out. We've come back from dinner. We got up to the house. The doors are locked. We can't get in. They're barricaded. We're trying to use our keys. Wait, what's going on here. The people in AI, I think Zionists too, capitalist interest, oil and gas, all of this, 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. Well said. Good metaphor. Thanks. Painting a good picture in my mind. Well, it's a bad picture, but painting it well. Kevin O'Leary lives right now in Miami Beach, Florida, because obviously no shade. But Walter Masterson, who's great, did this video where he went to Miami Beach, Florida to the specific area that Kevin O'Leary lives in. And he was like going up to residents being like, should we build a data center on the beach right here? I think it would be a great way to outpace China in the AI race. And they were all like, what the fuck?

Get the fuck out of here. No, we're not doing a fucking data center. And it's like, yeah, because Kevin O'Leary doesn't want that in his backyard. No. But also thinks that like anyone protesting it in Utah is a paid agent of the Chinese government, which we're going to get to in a second. Yeah, we'll get into that in the second. And I want to unpack some of the kind of Cold War mythology that he's copy pacing onto his own self-interest.

But I think the reason that Utah is notable and maybe O'Leary wasn't anticipating this pushback is that Elon Musk was smart enough to know that America is a pretty damn racist country. So I'm going to stick my Grock AI in Memphis, a predominantly black city and poison this area and understand that they're largely not going to get a ton of pushback. I mean, gosh, Tennessee just disenfranchised almost that entire metro area. by carving it up in the state legislature in a redistricting fight. So they've been disenfranchised politically, and it's easier for someone like Elon Musk to go in and pollute a population that's majority black. Utah, maybe a bit of a different story. So Kevin O'Leary, less rich than Elon Musk, more pathetic than Elon Musk and not as good at his job as Elon Musk. Just throwing that out there.

Yeah, and to be more pathetic than Elon Musk, I mean, that is one achievement Kevin O'Leary can say he has. Yes, exactly. This data center project, which is under construction, has garnered massive protests in Utah and really around the country. But huge protests in Utah. Shout out to everyone in Utah who might be listening to this, who has been showing up for that. You are seriously like doing the Lord's work in this country. Kevin O'Leary does not know how to handle pushback to anything because like everyone of his stature, he has the most fragile ego in existence. Of course, one of the primary motivators of those protesters are the environmental concerns of the data center.

Kevin O'Leary has this insane, canned response to the environmental inquiry, which is this. How are you offsetting these environmental concerns? Well, I'm actually the only developer of data centers on Earth that graduated from environmental studies. Emma, he said this in like 16 different interviews. I think I'm the only guy doing this that graduated from environmental studies. That's good. That's good to know that you studied environmental science as you destroy the environment. It's almost like you got a peek into the beauty that you're about to completely erase from the planet. He goes on to say in that specific video, which is like I guess he's learning the art of like, oh, we got to do front-to-camera videos in the car now.

Like, we have to be intimate with our fans and the people who hate us. He goes on to be like, as someone who studied environmental science, I'm aware of all of these options. We could do solar power. Sustainability is at the heart of what we do in terms of all these proposals. And so we search for the best technology. There's many air-cooled turbines now. So you're blending in air-cooled versus water. There's so many different ways to generate power.

We can also put a percentage of the power generation through solar, wind, and batteries. I want to, he's also said this a hundred times. I want to set the standard for sustainability and data center construction. I am going to show them these data centers. They're going to be this shining example of how you do this sustainably because I'm the only guy that is graduated out of environmental studies and builds data centers. No one else on earth has done that.

Meanwhile, this data center is just not utilizing any of those methods that he's putting forth. It's being powered entirely by natural gas. Well, the technology is not there to actually, power these data, data centers with green energy, it's just not there. 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. 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, right? But in part, the administration that's in power right now, Trump has killed a lot of these projects that were focused on researching this kind of thing. It's crazy to see guys like Kevin O'Leary, other folks who are trying to make sure that these AI data centers are built as quickly as possible, circumvent the real concerns that so many people have about this happening in their backyard. Now, for example, AI data centers, just like if you don't care about the environment at all, are driving up energy costs for so many Americans. Electricity usage is largely flatlining when it comes to the usage by everyday people. But for commercial and industrial usage, it's going crazy because these data centers are taking up so much of our electrical capacity and energy capacity across the country. and there are no guardrails in place to make sure that they bear more of that cost, and it's being offset onto consumers with your regular energy and electricity bills.

So it's a real problem, and they're banking on the fact that the regulatory framework has not caught up to the tactics that they're using, and they are right to bet on this. This is a tactic that tech has used more broadly, whether it's Uber in major cities, like in New York, where you had cab drivers who had paid, saved up so much of their life, as Kevin O'Leary would say, by the way, they saved up all their money to buy a medallion, which allows you to drive a taxi cab in New York City. It's like an investment in your own individual small business, and it's not cheap.

And when Uber came to town, basically they marketed themselves as a tech company and not a cab company, and they were able to circumvent the regulations and the medallion requirements that cab drivers in the city had to pay into and invest into. With the stroke of a pen, 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 not. And Zora Mamdani, current mayor of New York, did hunger strikes with cab drivers on this very issue. But there were also many who truly killed themselves, literally, in front of City Hall in protest for how this emissorated them and ruined their livelihood. 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 ride share technology. 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. going to impact with the construction of their data center with this technology. And I just want to return a little bit to the China competition narrative. Can I tee you up for that? Oh, yes, please. And I also just want to applaud everything that you just said. Well, I need a glass of water because I've been talking for too long. So this gets me a real opportunity to sip. You earned it, sister. That was really, really good. Like I said, the data center in Utah has drawn these massive, massive protests, to which Kevin O'Leary says the following.

The thing that got me motivated, though, was watching in the last two years of this narrative in North America about how negative data centers are. It started in Virginia, actually. The idea that they consume a lot of water, that they are very noisy, and all that's true from stuff that was built 15 years ago, but today that's not the case. And yet the narrative kept going. And I thought, who's doing this? who would not want us to have compute power?

Who would not want us to build our power grid out? Because when you build a data center today, you have to develop your own power and you can sell it back to the grid. That's what we're doing in Utah. I'm thinking to myself, the Chinese. They don't want us to do that. And I went through that whole thing with TikTok, as you may recall,

and I actually saw the evidence of how the Chinese were manipulating the algorithm. Now they're doing it a different way. And that just kind of pisses me off. So I'm happy to add computer. I'm like I don't want my kids in 20 years who live in New York being told what's eat for breakfast by the Chinese. If I were the Chinese, the last thing I want in America is the five or six tech companies that are competing with me on DeepSeek having more compute capacity. I want to shut down every single proposal for every single data center in every single state. And I want agitators.

I want paid protesters. I want environmentalists. I want to shut it all down so that they can't train their models as fast as I can. Okay. So much there. So what he's basically saying is that any negativity you may feel towards a data center, much less being built in your own backyard, is direct or indirect influence from China because China's motivated to get you to go out and protest those data centers so China can get ahead with the technology.

It's not all of the very real environmental claims that environmentalists have so graciously brought forth and publicized. It is not the threat of misinformation, especially coming up on a midterm election and then a presidential election, not long after that. It is not the total erosion of jobs, especially the first rung of jobs in so many industries that now college graduates can't enter into at all. It's none of those things. It is Chinese propaganda on TikTok. What about spiritual Israeli stuff? Are we going to bring that back up again? But I guess we'll stay on track for just a second. To talk about the cynical usage of Cold War narratives to copy paste your business model into what previously fueled certain investment, which was the idea that we had to defeat communism with the USSR. and we have to be engaging in this kind of competition. Now, back in the day, I don't think a lot of this was good.

It resulted in many wars, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Cold War, was disastrous for so many people across the world. Kissinger's brutalization of Cambodia. I mean, you know, we could, the genocide there, we could go on and on. But at the very least, when the United States was competing with the USSR and the Cold War, we had the United States' like government involved directly more in, say, the space race. That was state investment, which is a lot more direct. It allows for less waste than when you have capitalist controlling certain competitive arrangements because, especially in this very highly financialized system that we live in,

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. 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. It's already gone. It's lost. I encourage everybody to look up carbon brief, this real analysis I cite all the time. It's inconvenient here in the United States. But China, has been growing at its most rapid pace in its history. And last year, they were able to decline carbon emissions by 1% in the final quarter of the year,

securing a decline for 0.3% for the full year as a whole. Meaning, China is growing at its largest pace, and they have also, in a year, reduced carbon emissions and are building out an infrastructure that is more resilient and less reliant on fossil fuels. That is how a government that has actual like state capacity that can direct these kinds of investments is operating. It's a government that understands that they want to set themselves up, China, to be a future global hegemon. And the way to do that is to reduce reliance on oil and gas, on coal, on all of this dirty energy that's going by the wayside. What is the United States doing in comparison? We are turbocharging fossil fuel emissions.

We are tripling down on it via our investment in the Middle East, and Trump is orienting foreign policy towards that. But even in the way that we're scrapping these climate projects and it's all going towards building out these AI data centers, the way that they're being built is not going to be sustainable even in a neutral race with China about what data is being collected by these AI data centers. So I bring this up to just really say that this is a silly attempt to use a Cold War framework that no longer applies to get Roobes to invest in certain AI companies so that these guys can make more and more money under the guise of competition with China. When that competition is already done, it's over. It's been lost. We don't have an efficient economy anymore. these people at the very top are extracting so much wealth that could be going towards, even if you only cared about the AI race with China, towards improving that technology. Instead, it goes towards making these guys rich. And they are trying to get, and double dip, they're trying to get the American people

to bear the brunt of it from an environmental perspective, from a government priority perspective, in a variety of different communities across the country. And so, again, Kevin O'Leary with his, you know, children's hospital closing face that he shows all the time, I think is not being honest about the reality about competition with China. And it's just a way to use a national security framework to obscure valid environmental and societal concerns. Yeah, that was said better than anything I could have said. I don't know about that. No, it definitely is and I do know about that. But I will add, I heard a quote recently that I thought was really good, which is just that in the race to beat China at AI, the only winner is AI.

Right. And I mean, you know, we're about to have one of the worst El Nino's ever. I mean, last year, do we remember that California was on fire? 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. You're the true fascist because you demand terms of service for anti-translars on social media companies. The reality is that fascism, it's an outgrowth of Hitler and Mussolini's ideologies in their reigns in the 20th century. You can characterize it as high levels of militarism, high levels of nationalism, anti-democracy that tries to circumvent the will of the people. 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. But also in regards to this conversation about Kevin O'Leary in 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. 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. Kevin O'Leary is not a big player in that space.

Yeah. 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. 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. Right. I want to conclude here, if I, like, think. May referencing a film that I saw a while ago. 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. But I do. When I was at Sundance a couple years ago, I saw a movie called Veni Vidi Vici, which means I came, I saw, I conquered. And it was kind of a weird film. I don't even know if I really liked it. But the premise was interesting. It was about a really, really rich family that hunted human

beings for sport. You've learned this pretty early on in the movie 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 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? 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. And the movie just, it's a little too long and it kind of makes its point pretty early on and then just goes on for too long. But I've thought about it so many times. And I think about it with someone like Kevin O'Leary or any of these rich assholes.

that movie obviously I think it would be a little bit of a stretch to say that Kevin O'Leary is literally hunting people for a sport you know the point that it was making is that this is the level of like death and destruction and havoc that people like this wreak on society

and we let it happen when we allow ourselves to buy into the myth that if we just look away if we just turn our cheek to all of the horrible things that are happening we might be on their side of the equation soon enough. We could be in their orbit.

We could have money like them. We can buy into the myth the same way that Kevin O'Leary says he did with the ice cream shop story. I don't know. To me and I try to always have these, some might say, rosy takeaways at the end of episodes, but it is the job of everyone to divest themselves from that myth. You will never be able to scam the way that Kevin O'Leary scammed, because like I said, there's finite room for those scammers.

And much like, you know, a multi-level marketing scheme, under American capitalism, it's basically all been filled up by people like Kevin O'Leary. When you mention an MLM, there's a pyramid. And that pyramid is not getting inverted with the scammed being the minority. You know, in many ways, capitalism is a large-scale pyramid scheme. And it doesn't mean that we should feel like life is worthless or that we can't change anything and that, you know, this economic system is so overbearing that we can't imagine a better future. It's just to maybe release some people of the internalized guilt that they felt that Kevin O'Leary is so comfortable promulgating with self-help books. And fuck Josh Safdi for casting Kevin O'Leary.

What was that? Literally, just like so... My husband outwoked me. Like, I kind of liked the movie and he was like, he's such a scumbag, Emma. I couldn't get into it. Why couldn't they cast somebody that just played a scumbag and I could get into it? And the more I sit with it, I'm like, you outwoked me. You outwoked me, buddy.

You really did. You're right. I mean, it's true. I mean, their whole thing was like, I mean, Kevin said this in press conferences for Marty Supreme. was like, well, it was just such a good fit because I'm such an asshole in real life and I was good at playing an asshole on TV. And he was good at playing an asshole in the movie. But also, so would have an actor. Yeah. I got it. I mean, look, the Safdi's, I liked the casting of

Kevin Garnett in Uncut Gems, but that was relevant because he was playing himself. You could have cast any SAG-A-A-A-actor to be in your production that would have been able to play a rich asshole. It's not like there are a dearth of white men in Hollywood that could have done the exact same thing. Emma, thank you so much for joining me. I have to go and eat my Chanel jacket, but this was a real pleasure. Good for you. That is an appropriate allocation of your resources, and you're going to be able to have a retirement now. Congratulations.

Thank you so much. I can't wait to be a homeowner. Where can people find more of you besides on this very podcast? The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. I am the non-Sam Cedar. We are live every weekday, noon, Eastern at the Majority Report. We are a daily progressive political podcast. We cover the news of the day.

We in the fun half do some mockery of right-wingers, but for the most part, our first half is pretty dry and informative, where we have experts on. I would encourage people to check that out either on YouTube or in podcast form, join the Majority Report.com. Look at that plug. I've actually figured I had to do a real plug. That was really good.

That was really good. Ralleled it off, etched into the back of your brain. Thank you so much for listening to this episode today. I love you. I hope you enjoyed it. To all the Canadians who sent me messages that you were happy, I was covering this burden that you have had to carry. I hope I did it justice.

Thank you so much again to Emma. Just so much fun collaborating with such a good friend. It really does feel like hanging out. Yep. Until next time, I love you so much and stay fruity.