How Did Mr. Wonderful Get His Name & Fortune?
53:14 Share

It's time to take the quiz. Five questions, five minutes a day, five days a week. Take the quiz every weekday at thequiz.fox and then listen to the quiz podcast to find out how you did. Play, share, and of course, listen to the quiz at thequiz.fox.

Well, welcome to the Jason and the House podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz, and thanks for spending a little time with us today. I think you're going to really enjoy this because we got a thought or two on the news. I'm going to highlight the stupid because, you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. And then rather than phone a friend, we actually are going to be able to sit down with Kevin O'Leary. You know him from Shark Tank. You've seen him on television, one of the great and successful entrepreneurs that there is.

And I sit down and have a discussion about how Kevin O'Leary became kind of Kevin O'Leary and how he thinks through things and what he looks for and in investments. And as an entrepreneur, I don't know exactly where this conversation is going to go, but it's he's kind enough to.

Uh, I'm actually recording this one in New York city. He's in the Fox news building and we're going to have a little discussion and, uh, I think it's going to be fascinating. So you want to stick around for that. But as I like to do, I really wanted to start with, uh, the news and, um,

Here we go. We're in the summertime. There's the back and the forth with the weather. There's all kinds of discussions about climate and climate change and whatnot. I just truly believe through the eons of time, weather has changed. Climate has changed. It happens. You had this event with this, you know, major event.

smoke that filled New York City and the Northeast, and suddenly it becomes huge news. You know, out West, I'm living in the Intermountain West. We have forest fires that are happening all the time.

I've got a candidate, actually a winner for the stupidest comments regarding this. We're going to get to that in a minute. But I want to go back and talk about some of the other news items that are out there really just a little bit because I'm really anxious to sit down and have the conversation with Kevin O'Leary. But

I'm still frustrated with where this country is at, particularly on the Democratic side and the discussion about should we even have a debate? The idea that in this country, are we going to debate or not debate with political leaders taking on the biggest, weightiest issues of our time? I find it stunning that there are those people that advocate that somebody like a Joe Biden doesn't need to actually debate.

You know, I think we missed a lot in our last presidential cycle. If you recall, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were going to debate on foreign policy. And that debate was screwed up and then never rescheduled. And we voted anyway. And look at the difference between Trump and Biden as it relates to foreign policy. That type of discussion has got to be had. And here you have, you know...

Kennedy, who's running for, who wants to run for president. And he's getting close to 20% of the polling. And the idea that Joe Biden is not even going to debate, he's not even on the ballot in New Hampshire. I'm going to go ahead and make a prediction. You've heard me say this before, but I want to go on the record again. I don't think that Joe Biden will be the nominee even before the end of this calendar year. I think he will have dropped out for one reason or another because

I don't think he'll be there. And I think the mix of people will be somewhere between Kamala Harris, Governor Newsom out of California, and Susan Rice. That's my sleeper that nobody's talking about. I really do believe that Barack Obama would love to see Susan Rice in there. She's worth a lot of money, so she can go out on the campaign trail and do this. She's taken on the foreign policy. She's taken on the domestic policy.

And I think people behind the scenes want to see her continue to rise and shine and take on these big political offices, including the presidency of the United States. Maybe it's vice president. I don't know the mix, but I'm just telling you between those three or four, that's what I think is going to happen on the Democratic side. On the Republican side of the ticket...

Again, we'll see how it plays out, but Fox News has the first Republican debate coming up in August. Then that should be fascinating and really important. All right, let's transition to the stupid because I kind of teased it. I kind of teased it when I said, you know,

We got some stupid comments that were made about all the smoke that's poured into New York City a few weeks ago. So let's bring on the stupid because, you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. All right, I want to highlight a tweet that Representative Ryan Zinke put out because he highlighted. I'm giving him some credit. Representative Jayapal, she put out a tweet and it said...

Imagine being a Republican climate change denier in Congress. You show up at work at the Capitol Day, see the skies filled with smoke, and you still don't get what we need, bold and immediate action to save our planet. Ridiculous.

Ryan Zinke retweeted that, but he wrote, Imagine being a radical extremist with a baseless agenda who blocks common sense forest management practices and makes the West live in a shadow of smoke for months out of the year because of it. Ridiculous. Hats off to Ryan Zinke and to the Congresswoman. She doesn't really understand what forest management is all about. But for those of us in the Intermountain West, let us kind of teach you a little bit about this.

If you were to look at a map of private lands versus public lands, you'll see that private lands have far less fires than public. And the reason is that the public lands, we fight all the time with these radical environmentalists who don't want to do anything. They don't want to clear out the underbrush. They don't want to fight and weed out the dead trees. And consequently, they're

the timber becomes just fuel for massive forest fires. And I would argue that you do have more problems with these massive forest fires than you would by clearing out the deadwood that dies naturally along the way and clearing the underbrush and having good forest management. So Congressman Zinke gets it.

I'd like to think that I get it. You're going to still have forest fires. We have through eons of time. But for those in the Northeast and other countries that don't ever deal with this, who think it's all about climate change, I'm sorry. I just think that's kind of a stupid and naive way to look at things because it is much more complicated than that.

All right, let's move on, though. I want to move to talking to Kevin O'Leary because I find him to be a fascinating individual. He's fun and I learned a lot when I watched the show Shark Tank. And he happens to be here at Fox, and I managed to get him to come in and chat with us. So let's sit down with Kevin O'Leary.

Well, I'm thrilled to have Kevin O'Leary right here with us in person. I've seen you a lot on television, read about you, seen you now more and more on Fox News, but I'm thrilled to spend some time with you, get to know you a little better. I'm trying to be everywhere all the time. Well, you are. You're omnipresent. Thank you. You're Mr. Wonderful, but you're also Mr. Omnipresent. I can tell you that. I appreciate it. No, there's a lot to learn. I love watching Shark Tank.

because I learn stuff, you know, and wait is to think things through. It's fun. It's entertaining. I love to see people sweat and making their pitch. And it's fun to see how it works out. We had no idea it would grow to what it's become. Believe me, in the beginning, producers, Mark Burnett, Disney, ABC, Sony,

For three years, like any other television show, it was lost in the weeds. But in its fourth year, it exploded to the upside. I remember it happening. It was quite extraordinary. Well, I want to get to more of that, but I want to go back to little Kevin. It started back when I was born in... Because I'm always fascinated. People that have a high degree of success...

There's some commonality and there's also some really insightful things that happen. And I want to kind of hear your life story and how you got, how you and I ended up sitting here together. Yeah, it's, you know, I thought I had an ordinary upbringing, but I've learned over time that's not the case, but it's the one I experienced. So I was born in Montreal, Canada of...

Irish father, Lebanese mother. So there was a lot of immigration going on in Canada, particularly Lebanese and Irish. And so they got together. But my biological father died when I was very young. I was eight years old. And my mother remarried a professor or a graduate, an engineering graduate, and

in the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and we moved there. And so I had some very formative years at Bottenfield High School in Champaign-Urbana in Illinois. And I remember the golf course, my lemonade stand, all that stuff.

And as soon as he graduated, he became a member of the ILO, which is the United Nations. And we started moving to different countries every two years. So we started in Cambodia, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Geneva, Switzerland, France. I mean, we just moved everywhere. And...

you know, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. I met Haile Selassie when I was there. I met Paul Pott in Phnom Penh. And I just thought, well, that's how everybody grows up. But obviously, later on, I realized, well, that was one heck of an upbringing because it really got me an opportunity to see the rest of the world in a way that you can't unless you're there. And all the different cultures and foods and remarkable places and

all these individuals I met and I was old enough to appreciate it and I think it was very very it made me a different kind of person in terms of how I think about life and how it works because I don't have a North American centric only view of the world interesting yeah I've lived in so many places and learn so much in doing so and I reflect on that it makes me better investor for sure

Now, were you brothers, sisters? Were you playing sports? Were you a voracious reader? What were you doing when you were young? Because moving for a lot of people is hard. Now, I moved, but not like you moved. I moved from California to Arizona and then to Colorado. So, you know, I thought I moved a lot. Well, in most of the world, it's soccer. So I played soccer right through, you know, school, high school.

I eventually became a goaltender, which is a pretty harrowing role. You know, in some countries, if you let a goalie in, they kill you. That's no exaggeration, Bugs. I'm a huge soccer fan. I grew up playing soccer.

And it's true. Some of these places, you let the wrong goal in. And these poor referees, you make the wrong call that they don't like. You're not making it out of that stadium. So, you know, I learned those cultures. I also became a chef at a young age because in Cambodia particularly, it was a French colony.

We were there at the actually beginning of the Vietnam War. The first bombs missed Vietnam, and that was a difficult time. But I learned to go to the market at four in the morning because it's so hot there. You go before the sun comes up on the Mekong Delta and learned how to cook Asian fusion, French

because they can't use butter. It just goes rancid in an hour there. So you use mango chutney, lime and lemon, and I've actually become pretty good at it. Wow. Yeah, I do a lot of stuff as Chef Wonderful now. Well, that sounds good. You have these experiences when you're young and they stick with you, and I do a lot of cooking and a lot of experimentation with...

making foods lighter because of the team and dang with the name of the chefs that, you know, worked in our household. And they just, at my age, he just took me along. I was, they were babysitting, but I was in the kitchen with them all day. That, yeah, I mean,

It's interesting, right? Yeah, that makes total sense now that you say it. So as you're progressing, you're getting older, you're going to school, but then what? You start to form some interests. What was interesting to you? I was really interested in photography and music.

I played guitar. I wanted to be in a rock band like every other teenager. I wanted to be a photographer. And my stepfather, by this time, was very influential in my life because he said, look, you're just not good enough. It's great that you love it and it's a passion, but you have to compete with the very best in the world to make a living doing this, and you're just not good enough. And that was very sobering to listen to, but he was right. He said, why don't you go back

I graduated university and in fact I did quite well because I actually started to make film at that time and I was telling my professors, why don't I document this and why don't you give me some grades for it, the actual film.

educational process. I did my first film in university and then I went on to do my MBA because my dad said, my stepdad said, you don't have enough business tools. And so back in those days, you spent two years doing it. And, um, I also made a film during that experience and, and I was shooting 16 millimeter film, editing it, adding sound to it. And I really liked that

you know, creative process. Because I'm a big believer in management is business is half the discipline of binary black and white. You make money, you don't, but you also need the chaos of art to be a good thinker. Right. So I always look for that in the people I hire now as managers. What else do you do? Are you a dancer? Are you a photographer? Are you a painter? You know, what do you do? And you find that the very best managers have these passions outside of business that keep them very stable and good thinkers. But that's the way I looked at it. And when I graduated, um,

you know much to the concern of my my father said look I'm gonna start a production company and work for the networks and I'm gonna focus on just the original six hockey cities I wanna get good at one thing and I'm going to produce for them the intermission shows for the Saturday night games

And I got a contract and we did really well. I mean, we started, you know, running around all over the country, you know, Chicago, Philadelphia, Montreal, Toronto, you know, and, and, and shooting all the stars of the day. And we were there when Gretzky was coming up, making all these films on film during the week, cutting them and putting them up to the satellite. And,

And we came up with some formats in television, which you probably know about. Here we are in a television studio. But we invented something called Don Cherry's Grapevine, the famous Boston coach. And he had his own talk show with his dog, Blue. And we owned that format. And it exploded all over the Northeast. And we got, you know, somebody approached us and said, we want to buy the company. It was called Special Event Television. And that was my first deal. Wow.

And I said, hey, this is good. Life's good. This is good. Why don't I do it again? And that was it was sort of the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. I'd had a bad experience in high school working as an ice cream scooper that really changed my. What happened? I got my first job.

in a mall called Lincoln Fields, very famous mall. And I did it because the girl I was hot for in grade 11 worked at the shoe store across from this ice cream parlor called Magoo's Ice Cream Parlor. So my first day on the job...

When people come to sample ice cream as a scooper, you give them a little wooden stick to try different flavors, and they take their gum out and they throw it on the floor. So at the end of the day, the Mexican tiles were completely black with sticky gum. That's my first day. And the woman who owned the store said, look...

before you leave, you've got to scrape all this gum off the floor. And I said, I looked at the girl across, she was waiting for me to come out and I was kind of, you know, trying to be cool. Yeah. It was really, I didn't want to get on my knees and be scraping the floor in front of her. Right. Right.

And I said to the woman, look, I can't do that. This would be very bad for my brand. Always a brand guy. And she said, yes, you do. Because I said, you hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. And she said, no, I hired you to do whatever I say. I own the store. And I said, well, I'm sorry, but that's not in my definition of the role that you hired me for. She said, well, here's a definition you should learn. You're fired. Yeah.

And I got fired on my very first day and it was really humiliating to take my bike back and tell my mother I got whacked on the first day on the job. And she said, maybe you should listen to what they're telling you to do. And I said, I don't want to do that. Like, I want to do what I want to do. And that was the beginning of the understanding in my view. What I learned that day was there's two types of people in the world. There's the people that own the store.

or there's the people that scrape the shit off the floor. And I'm not saying being an employee is a bad thing, but if you want to control your own destiny, you've got to own the store. And I never worked for anybody again in my life. She was such an important influence for me. Years later, we took the cameras back to find her, to thank her, because by then I could afford to bulldoze the whole mall if I wanted, but all from her. And so years later, I got this FedEx package with a brick in it,

And I still have it on my desk with a note from the person who sent it to me. They bulldozed them all. And he went and got one of these bricks for me.

Now, did it have gum on it? It was a really important lesson. When I ask other entrepreneurs that had great success, there's always that defining moment which sets them on their journey. And that was mine. And I never was pursuing, you know, the greed of money. I wanted freedom. Yeah. That's what it gave me. Yeah. This is what I worry about now. And I want to continue about your journey, but as a little sidebar.

My concern about the younger generation is that they don't have these type of formative experiences. Like with my kids, I didn't care how much money they made. I just wanted them working for somebody else. I wanted them to have a boss and have some responsibility and learn the value of a dollar and have that.

I would hope at the end that entrepreneurial spirit to say, yeah, I can be a leader and this is the type of leader I would want to be. But I worry that these, you know, 13, 14, 15, 16 year olds, they just don't have that experience. And then when they do get to college age, we expect them to go out and make a bunch of money to pay rent and all these other things, but they haven't had the experiences before. You know, you're right. That actually is a...

The concept of apprenticeship has been developed a lot more in Europe than it is here. Right.

they don't pay anything but you learn a lot and then if you're if you have the talent they'll hire you right you've learned the ropes working for other people we don't do that enough here in america and we should learning a craft and having the discipline of working for somebody else is really important even if you want to be an entrepreneur right and i remember working for steve jobs uh... for a while uh... at the learning company we did all of his educational software

I used to go for the meetings to negotiate, you know, we were each budget, maybe it would be 25 million for the each year to do the upgrades. And I would sit with him and he was not really a very nice person, to be honest with you, but he, he really knew what he wanted. And he, and he had a vision with no flexibility in, in how you would get there. And we had these horrific fights and,

But I learned something from him that I think is very, very important. He used to say to me, you know, I'd say to him, well, we've done some research on Rita Rabbit. We have consumer research that says we should take it in this direction. And he would say, I don't give a shit about your research. That doesn't mean anything to me. Here's what I want out of Rita Rabbit on the Mac, okay?

My customers don't know what they want until I tell them what they want. And I said, you arrogant. Like, you know, we spend millions of dollars on customer research. He said, it's worthless. It's worthless. I know what they want. Do this for me and I'll pay for it. He was 100% right. And so...

you learn from the experiences you have working with people that have just opposed views to you. And, you know, we didn't agree on anything, but I started to realize, wait a second,

These strategies work, and I should open my mind up to doing that. Let's take some risk and make our own decisions, bypass the two years of research or 12 months, whatever it is, and just do the product and put it out there and see what happens, which is his strategy. Not all of his products worked. The Lisa was a dog because I was around for that one. But...

most of the stuff really worked. Well, and some people can have that vision and see it. And a lot of people don't, they think they do, but they don't. And they haven't had the ability to kind of think through the finances of it and how is it going to work and what the end looks like. Right. I mean, that is part of it. Oh yeah. But, but it's, you want to do as much as you can explore and always keep in mind that

you're learning every day. I learn new stuff every day by just getting involved with people that do things that I don't do or have passions of something that I don't have.

And I just, I do that all the time. I mean, I'm really interested in watches now. I have a massive, massive watch collection, but I'm learning every day about new watchmakers. And I'm very fortunate now because all the brands know me and they know I don't resell my watches. So I get offered extraordinary pieces. Well, you got a beautiful one on right now. Well, I'm wearing two. This is an FP Journe, a very rare FP Journe. That's my watch. This is an Apple watch.

which I don't look at the time on, I consider that very bad to do that. This counts my steps. - Yeah. - Which my joint can't do that. - I like the fitness on top. Right, right. - And so I'm very interested in health and wellness and all that stuff. And this watch does so many things. - The wearable market is going to be- - Yeah, I mean, I've tried all the wearables. The Apple seems to be the best connected to my phones.

But for watch collecting, I mean, this watch is appreciated more than my stock portfolio has in the last three years. It scares me to ask how much that might be. These are insane watches. But I consider them investments. And, you know, when I come home with another watch and it costs $300,000, my wife says –

I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a good person. I'm not sure if you're a

She says, that's stupid. You'll never sell it. And I said, in fact, I'm bringing it in the coffin with me. I'm going to need a good time piece on the other side, but, but it's true. I don't sell them, but I consider that the asset class, you know, some people buy cars, some people collect swords and pens and all kinds of different things. My things watches. That's good. Okay. So let's go, let's go back to the, the progression that you're making. You've left university. You've

You've become, you know, you've realized you're not going to work for somebody else. You got the, not only the bug, but you're having success.

But walk through some of those milestones along the way. When I was working cutting, I'm still an editor, and I still cut at least one of our social media posts every week on Premiere Pro just to keep my chops up. And I just want to, you know, sometimes I'll get up at three in the morning, I have an idea, and I'll go cut it just to keep the chops. But while I was doing that on an eight-plate Steenbeck with those people who know film will realize that's real film, and you're cutting film, and you're cutting the soundtrack. Right.

We used to have to make graphics for the stuff we were sending up to the satellite, like the title, Bobby Orr and the Hockey Legend, one of our shows. We'd have to make that. And that was expensive. And I went when I was always interested in computers. And I went to an Osborne user group at a library near our studio. And I met this guy named John Freeman. He was working for an oil company. And he had taken a two-pin Hewlett-Packard plotter with an Osborne CPM computer and programmed

a piece of software that could actually write titles and graphs and charts. And I looked at it and I said, "Wow, like this guy is cutting so much cost out of going to a graphic house and waiting a week to get the work done, etc." So I said to him right on the spot, "John, you're working full-time at an oil company. I'm, you know, got an entrepreneurial bent. I'm interested in starting a new company.

Right on the spot. You want to go 50-50? You want to be partners? Let's each put in $10 right here. Let's start a company. And he said, what do you want to call it? And I said, let's call it SoftKey. Like the idea of software, but the key, I don't know the name. Yeah, it flows. Yeah. It's easy to remember. You can spell it. Yeah. And I said, John, why don't you develop this software product? Let's call it KeyChart because it makes charts on an HP plotter.

And when it's ready, I'm going to get on a plane and fly to San Diego, find out who the product manager is for Hewlett-Packard two-pen plotters. They had two-pen and six-pen. These things were XY axis drawing with software code directing how they'd work. So you could actually do a graphic on a piece of paper with pens that were robotically moving with our software. And my strategy was different than everybody else. This is now the emergence of the...

you know small computers it wasn't IBM was coming up back then computers were seven thousand dollars they were still very expensive at a Boca Raton but the Osborne was was cheaper was about nineteen hundred dollars so I went and I met this woman named Mary Zoller and I said to her Mary instead of buying one package from me at 199 bucks how about you give me a dollar ninety-nine and bundle my software with every plotter you manufacture around the world

She said, "No one's ever proposed that before." I said, "Yeah, but what do you think? I mean, you would have an advantage. You wouldn't have to make people buy more software. You'd have mine in the box." She said, "I'm not sure HP's gonna do that, but have you talked to any of the Japanese competitors?" And I said, "Well, I'm talking to you first, 'cause I like HP." She said, "Well, I'm telling you no right now, but I wanna see if anybody else picks it up."

Well, that was great advice because I got them all. So we started selling millions of copies. And by then the price was down to 19 cents a copy, but it didn't matter. We were making a lot of money. And that was the birth of SoftKey software products. So I just spent the rest of my time on airplanes flying to these manufacturers. That's our first product. And SoftKey took off.

in my basement, it grew, we started hiring more people. We moved it to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bain Capital became a shareholder, TH Lee.

It became the world's largest reference graphic and educational software company. Wow. And we sold it for $4.2 billion. And that was just a journey. It wasn't an overnight success. It took nine years. But that was my largest exit ever. And it set me up to do the things I do today. But I learned a lot. I mean, it was, you know, I was...

I was flying around the world eight days a week, 25 hours a day. It was crazy. It was crazy fun, too. But my kids grew up without me, and my wife kept our household together in Boston, and that's where they grew up. And I still consider Boston a wonderful home. I don't like the policy there with Elizabeth Warren, so I moved, along with everybody else, to Florida. No, very good. You had better text me. I still romantically... We still have a home there, but...

that state is not competitive anymore from a tax perspective. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more right after this. Listen to the all-new Bret Baier podcast featuring Common Ground. In-depth talks with lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle, along with all your Bret Baier favorites like his all-star panel and much more. Available now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Some of these states in the Northeast, I don't

They act mystified. They can't figure out why are people leaving? 3,000 license plates a month, leave New York, go to Florida. I've told the leadership here, you guys are not competitive. I said the same in Massachusetts. I can consider California non-investable. I don't put any money there. I believe there's a great competition going on between the states, good managed states, poorly managed states. New York falls into the poorly managed state bucket. Yeah, no, clearly. And they...

Anyway, I can tee off on a whole variety of those. But what lights your fire now? I mean, you could do whatever you want to do. You've been so successful. It's an enviable position to be in. But what gets you excited? Other than the watches, what gets you up in the morning and gets you excited? Well, I like to compete. What do you mean? Athletically? Yeah, I mean, I do. I maintain a pretty...

you know, rigid workout schedule. I don't play squash as much as I used to because it's really been tough on my back. You're very fit. I mean, seeing you in person, I can tell you're fit. Yeah. No, I'm very, you know, conscious of what I eat and how much sleep I get and what I... How much do you sleep? I try and do seven hours and 15 minutes a night. It's not easy. But if you actually, if you, I wear an Oura ring and if you look at the data and you, because I'm really data-driven and...

I can show you, I even wear a glucose monitor and I'm not a diabetic. I'm really intrigued on which foods spike your glucose. And the reason I care about that is I enrolled in a research study with a guy named Richard Isaacson out of here, New York in Cornell. He has a thesis, remarkable thesis, and he proved it. He said he could arrest dementia, not Alzheimer's, but dementia as you age, when you start to lose cognitive health,

He believes it's because you spent your whole life spiking your glucose, basically frying your brain with sugar. And I thought, what a preposterous proposal. He said, "Why don't you try it? Why don't you come in the study and see what happens if you actually get in the mode of keeping your glucose between 75 and 150, just try it." I said, "Well, how the hell am I going to do that?" He said, "Well, just staple this into your side, hook it to your phone and why don't you learn over six months which foods spike you?"

And sure enough, I got fascinated.

I lost 32 pounds. I started working out every day. I started monitoring my sleep. I felt my cognitive health improving. Really? Because, you know, when you're on television, you've got to think fast. You've got to answer stuff in 20 seconds. Right. It got better. I became a big advocate of what he does. And, you know, people ask me all the time, you know, you've got to do some basic things. I never used to care what I ate.

But there's some really shitty food out there. Yeah, exactly. And you don't want to eat too much of it. Right. It's not good for you. Right. Sugar is not that good for you. You don't need to eat that much of it. You don't have to. But you don't have to be, you know, maniac about it. Right. You just have to be cognizant of what you're eating and what you're drinking. And for me, it's just given me a whole new energy level. But having said all that, getting back to what I like to do is...

I love to work with entrepreneurs. I love to invest in them. I've got a large portfolio of companies. And I've learned something in the last few years that is really powerful. I believe today that social media, and media of course, but what we're doing right now is going to be heard mostly on social media. I'm going to help you reach millions of people with this interview because I have millions of followers and they're interested in our dialogue today.

But I can tell stories about companies, products, and services, and I can reduce their customer acquisition costs in very material ways. And so I can make an investment and start telling the story about why I made the investment and why I believe in the product, because I never invest in anything that I don't use, and change the direction and the outcome of that company. I'm a chef. I discovered a product on Shark Tank called Turbo Trusser.

Now, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the reason you want to trust a chicken or a turkey when you cook it is to keep the juices in it. If you trust it by binding the legs and the wings, you'll keep 38% more juice in the meat. Most people don't know that, but when you learn it, it's a significantly better bird. We showed that on Shark Tank. I started talking about it as Chef Wonderful.

We sold millions of dollars of that. Tomorrow on Good Morning America, Chef Wonderful will be making appearance with it, wearing my chicken suit, talking about TurboTrusher. It's a product I can tell a story about. I can change the destination of that company's outcome.

And, you know, I can change his destiny. That's powerful. And so that really motivates me to do what I do. And I chop my day into 30 day periods. And I'm really interested in finding new ideas and blowing them up. Why not? It's very entrepreneurial. I help these companies. We have a fantastic return on investment. And I love just to compete. I mean, I can beat most venture capitalists because all they know how to do

is get some Harvard MBA guys to do some analysis, but they can't change customer acquisition costs. It's their number one cost. They can't do anything about it. No one's ever heard of them. They're just rich guys, but nobody's hearing the story of the company.

That's what I can change. Well, I find them to be very book smart and that there's a... They're not street smart. Yeah, but there's a huge difference. What do you see the difference as? I look at Shark Tank, the platform, including all the sharks and all the guest sharks and

as the most powerful venture capital company in the world because what other venture capital company has operators as its owners, people that have actually done it in multiple sectors. I mean, nobody came from the same place, but we've all been operators, all run our own businesses. Has billions of dollars to invest, but here's the secret sauce, has 110 million eyeballs around the world watching us every night. Yeah.

Who has that? Yeah, that's true. No, it's one of a kind. Yep. So if you get on Shark Tank, even if you don't get a deal, we're going to change your life. It is. It's a fabulous show. What about politics fascinate you at all?

It is very fascinating and I gave it a run. I'm a Canadian. I'm Irish. I'm an Irish citizen. I'm an Emirati citizen now and I'm also a Canadian. And so I decided to take a run at leadership in 2016, same time when Trump was coming up.

similar populist mandate and I ran for leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. Really? Yes. I did not know that. Yeah, and it was a very interesting experience for me. I'd never seen Canada the way a politician would during a campaign. I went from one coast to the other in every small town. I was leading by a pretty wide margin until I hit Quebec, which is the 78 seats. It's the majority of the seats in Canada, which is...

like the Florida of Canada. And I needed to win 23 and I ended up with 11. So that cost me a lot of money and time. But it's an experience that taught me something very important, which is why I have a lot of respect for politicians now. When you're a celebrity, people like you or they don't like you. You know, that's a lot of people don't like Mr. Wonderful. I'm okay with it. You know, I'm not changing. It's impossible for me to change. But in politics, 50%...

of the voting constituency hates you. Not dislikes you. They hate you, and some of them want to kill you. And that's the lunatic fringe, the two and a half percent. My wife and I experienced some very crazy stuff during that time. And I realized...

wow, this is different. This is not celebrity. This is something else. And combining celebrity with politics is a toxic combination. A powerful one. Trump used it to his advantage during his original campaign. But

there's some downside to it. And that's what I learned about it. I'm glad I did it. I wouldn't do it again. I get called by politicians all the time to help them with their social, but I don't want to get in that again. I know what I'm good at and I want to stay in my lane.

But politics is one crazy, crazy, crazy business. So when the politics is parsed into a few different things, there's the political side of politics. But then there's also the management, the execution. And I look at government and it's just so mind boggling how backwards it is. And the numbers are so stunningly big. Yeah.

You know, you look at the finances of the country, the United States, and you think, how do we turn around something that is about to be $36 trillion in debt and no projection in the next 10 years to even balance the budget, let alone pay down that debt? It is a risk. I agree with you. But your original point is, I think, the one we should focus on. Executional skills are extremely hard to find in any sector, including politics.

great ideas are a dime a dozen, but finding someone who can execute on them very hard. And what I've learned is executional skills in politics are particularly difficult because

you look at extraordinarily successful politicians defined by their ability to raise money in let's take a OC for example or Elizabeth Warren I'm Bernie Saunders I don't agree with any of their policies right there wildly successful by the metric that matters in their business raising money and so you hear Elizabeth Warren with her absolutely outrageous statements are a OC her masterful control of social media but

horrible policies. Horrible. AOC drove out 10,000 jobs out of her own state. They were there. They wanted to come there. And I was part of that whole thing with Amazon and I realized she's absolutely, this is horrible what she's done. But listening to her message was very populist. So what I've learned, and in the context of Canada, I have a case going to the Supreme Court up there

I say about Canada, and I get to say this because I'm a shareholder and I own a passport. I was born there. It's the richest country on earth run by idiots. And I don't mean any disrespect when I say that. I'm just speaking the truth. Because the management there have no executional skills whatsoever. And the reason that is, they have this cancer in their electoral process there.

If you are a non-politician competing with one up in Canada and you go to 2 million, 5 million in deficit in your campaign, you have to stop fundraising the minute you lose. Well, the politician can continue to fundraise because they're a politician. They have the system. But you have to go raise it $1,600 at a time and you have 36 months to do it or you go to jail.

So nobody even competes with the inbred politician. There's no competition. I was one of the only person that ever tried. And then I realized, well, this is crazy. And so I brought a case to the court of Canada and it's been in the courts now for five years.

I'm very fortunate to be able to fund it, and now the politicians are getting nervous about it because it's beaten five challenges. It's on its way to the Supreme Court. And what I'm contesting is we have to level the playing field. Politicians should go to jail too if they can't raise their deficits. And then all of a sudden people start saying, well, wait a minute, that's not a good law. But these are the kind of things you learn in the journey. But I look at it and say to myself –

you can pick passions. I'm very, very fortunate because I want to do things with my day and my time left that really interests me. And so I don't, I don't have to do anything as you said earlier, but I chose, I choose to work harder than I ever had in my life because I'm really enjoying what I do. No, I can tell you're passionate about it and it shows. And,

Give me some of the social media, the websites and social media accounts so listeners can go and visit. Where do they go? Well, KevinO'Leary.com, Wondertrust.com. These are some of the things that I do. If you go to Kevin O'Leary, you'll see the whole portfolio of things we do. Some of the things I talk a lot about. The Wonder Fund is a venture fund for North Dakota.

Wonder Trust is for entrepreneurs to go get their employee retention credits. We haven't even talked about that, but it's something we should touch on.

uh something i discovered that nobody knows anything about you can get up to 26 000 per employee if you have a business that had w2 employees during 2020 2021 and i'll do it for you at wonder trust wow because i'm passionate about small business but it's all you know you can go to kevin o'leary tv on any of the social media platforms i've got millions and millions of followers

who let me know every day what they think. Yeah. Get some immediate feedback. Immediate feedback. And I've said to everybody, you know...

The price of what we enjoy here in American freedom of speech is the lunatic fringe, which is the two and a half percent of people who are just nuts. But I tolerate them because they have the right to say what they want because they have the right to say what they want. So I read some of this stuff that's absolutely insane and say democracy is working. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more right after this.

I keep telling my wife, though, don't read the comments, okay? Just don't read the comments. She takes them a little too literally, and I hope your wife doesn't do that as well. No, she takes it very personally. I say to her, honey, that's one of a million comments. Yes. What are you going to do, spend the next month reading these things? Exactly. All right, I've got some rapid questions for you. I ask everybody who comes on the show, we'll go through these fast. So the quick questions.

What was your first concert you ever attended? Jethro Tull. That would be fun. That's legitimate. It was amazing. Ian Anderson on flute, a bar on guitar. There were some great songs, you know, just really great stuff. If you could meet, if you'd call up your wife and say, hey, honey, guess what? Good, good fortune. You can invite anybody in the history of time to come break bread with you and share a meal. Who would you want to sit down and have that conversation with?

Bismarck. Really? Yeah. I'm a huge advocate for studying history, so you don't make the mistake again. Bismarck was the most masterful politician in history. Interesting. If you read, a lot of people don't know Bismarck, but Bismarck, because I'm a student of history, I love reading history, right down to Greek mythology. Bismarck, he would be a masterful politician today.

Even though the world's changed so much, he really understood there are no permanent enemies. There is only permanent interests. That's the philosophy. I'm aware, but I've never studied. You learned so much on Bismarck. So, you know, he would be my top pick. I would also love to talk to Napoleon. I mean, that guy was really interesting. That is fascinating. Yeah.

What's that other thing for you? When I say other thing,

When you want to escape the world, forget about things, just get to a happy place. For me, I like wildlife photography. I like to go out, photograph moose and bear, and I do that. Eight hours later, I kind of, and then I haven't even looked at my phone or anything else. When you want to kind of escape and do something fun, what's that for you? Well, there are two things. One of them is photography, because I've always wanted to prove to my dad that I could have done it. Right.

but I think today people buy my work from the celebrity factor and I do sell it for charity but I also want to become a better guitarist and it's impossible to be you know there are great great great guitarists that have an innate ability to play with feel and and I I've gotten much much better over the years but I'm so far behind cuz I can only practice so many hours a day I leave guitars in every hotel in America with an amp

And I'm very fortunate Fender made a Mr. Wonderful for me. Gibson just, I have an SG arriving to the Shark Tank set next week with Mr. Wonderful on the, on the neck. That's pretty cool. It's very cool. And it's, it's a classic built to the design from the mid sixties. So it's a lighter SG and I want to play better. So I generally come home every, you know, when I'm, I travel all week long, but I, I lay down a few tracks. I try and get better. Um,

you know I've switched over time to the guitarist I really want to emulate. Right now I'm trying to emulate John Mayer who's a great vocalist but he's actually one of the best guitarists in the world. An extremely very interesting feel on the blues and he has licks that others haven't got to yet. So you know, and you just have to listen and learn but I wish I could do that. I never will but it keeps me very... Have you ever met him? Yeah, actually he's a big watch collector.

He's a big Shark Tank fan. He came to the set, sat in my chair. We took some pictures. I went to see him with my wife, record one of his... He just said to me, look, you want to come and see how we record? At Capitol Records in L.A., we were shooting Shark Tank, and...

He said, "I gotta warn you though, I may wake up at three in the morning and I may feel I wanna lay down a track and if you're willing and you let me phone you." Sure enough, one in the morning, phone rings, I'm sitting, sleeping beside Linda, she was at the set and I said, "Do you wanna go see Marilee lay something down?" And she was dancing in the control room and I was in there. - How cool is that? - And playing his guitars.

He was a really nice guy. And I was showing him a Shark Tank product, a folding neck guitar, and he looked at it and said, that's a piece of s***. It was a great time. But he's also a big, big, big collector, particularly Rolex collectors.

And we often compare notes on that whenever I run into him. That's a small club, but that sounds like fun. He's very passionate. Some people stick in their lane with one brand. I tend to go off piece there. I have a lot of different brands. That's good. Two more questions. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no? Oh, yeah.

I mean, pineapple and pizza. Judges don't like that answer, by the way. You know, but you have to do that because you're doing a citrus. This is where I really went to with Asian Fusion. A citrus sweetness against a tart, you know, tomato sauce with a really pungent cheese makes a fantastic pizza. I do a lot of work with pineapple and combined with mushrooms also. That is the most rational answer I've ever heard. And I ask every person who comes on the podcast that question. So I'm highly impressed. Yeah.

I make an amazing pizza. I have one of the most successful ovens on the market, Bertiello Pizza Oven. Yesterday sold it on QVC. We're number one on QVC. That's great. All right, last question. Best advice you ever got?

Best advice I ever got was very simple. It was shut up and listen. Most people spend two-thirds of their day talking, one-third listening. Reverse it. You'll be much better if you do that. If you listen, no one can shut up. Everybody's got a big mouth. But I'm much better today at listening. When I get in a meeting, particularly in a negotiation, I don't say anything.

I just listen and people get nervous and they just start talking and they say things that they didn't want to say. It's a secret of negotiating. Just shut up. It is illuminating, right? Oh, you'd be amazed, particularly adversaries, all the litigation I've gone through and everything else and all these discoveries and everything. And I've been, you know, I've, I've learned over time the power of saying nothing is

is incredible because people just can't live with silence. And I just look at them and say nothing. And all of a sudden they blurt out stuff they didn't want to say. They can't help themselves. They don't understand the power of saying nothing. Interesting. Interesting.

Fascinating having a discussion with you. I really appreciate you taking the time. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on the Jason and the House podcast. Appreciate it. Yeah, great. Take care, my friend. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. All right. I can't thank Kevin enough for joining us. Very generous with his time. I could have kept going for hours. I'm fascinated by him. He got the answer on the pizza wrong, like I said, but that was actually a really fascinating answer.

We'd appreciate it if you would rate this podcast. That's very helpful. You can subscribe to it. That would be even better. In addition to that, I want to remind people that you can listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

You can also go over to foxnewspodcast.com for other really good podcasts. And I really appreciate you listening. And I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you join us next week with a fascinating interview. And I thank you again for your time. I'm Jason Chaffetz, and this has been Jason in the House.

Hey, it's Clay Travis. Join me for Outkick the show as we dive deep into a mix of topics. New episodes available Monday to Friday on your favorite podcast platform and watch directly on outkick.com forward slash watch.