Kevin O'Leary: "The BIGGEST Myth About Money That Keeps You POOR!"

Kevin O'Leary
It's a hobby that eventually should be taken behind the barn. And I'm the only shark that tells the truth and I'm your best friend because your idea does suck. It's going to zero, and you're not going to waste your time on it any longer. If you have the skills, you have the desire, you have the interest, and you have the ability to execute, within years, you'll be wealthy. AI is just another tool set and way overhyped.

It's like the Internet was in the early nineties. Where people are underserved in America is the opportunity to get educated because that actually determines outcomes more than anything else. What do you think the minimum wage should be? I don't believe in a minimum wage. I think the market decides.

Being married is not easy. It's a total pain in the ass, but it beats the alternative. The one thing I would have changed in my life if I could have, I would have.

Graham Stephan
Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. We really, really appreciate it. So I'm curious. We'll just start right off here because I know you're short on time. Who should not be an entrepreneur, and when do you know when to give up?

Kevin O'Leary
About two thirds of America should not be entrepreneurs. And the reason you would know that is you're unable to make the first step. If you don't have the ability to take risk, you'll never be a successful entrepreneur. Because I'll give you an example. In great business schools, I teach practically all of them, almost half the class become consultants.

They don't have the guts. Because think about a consultant. They never make any decisions of consequence. You get paid a lot. It's great.

If you go to the top of your consulting firm, maybe you make three $4 million a year. That's great. Can't complain about that. But every decision you make is just a consultation so that an executive who actually makes decisions, who's a real entrepreneur, can say yes or no to that idea. You're just making decisions of no consequence whatsoever.

And the reason I don't hire consultants is after two years, they get that virus. They're just generating opinions. They're not doing anything. And I don't mean to insult consultants. I would just never hire them.

And so if you really, you know, jump off and become a consultant, you're going into a life of mediocrity. And I'm trying to define the difference between that life of mediocrity and one where that same graduate says, I'm going to take a chance I'm 28 years old. I don't have a family yet. I'm going to start a business. I don't know if it's going to work or not, but I have the ability to just take that risk, not seeing what's on the other side of the chasm.

And I'm going to forego a salary of 200,000 a year because I want something more. Those are the people that become free one day because they make $5 million in a day, because they're entrepreneurs. And that consultant that you use, they're back enjoying their lives, but in a sea of mediocrity. Do you think you're born like that, though? Cause it seems as though there is a personality type that's more prone to becoming an entrepreneur who really pushes back against rules, against authority, and they wanna take a different path.

I don't know if you're born that way. I think you have events that occur in your life that are jolting to you. And every entrepreneur I talk to that's been successful has that defining moment where they say, I remember this moment in my life, and I remember what happened to me, and it just changed my direction. It's like a meteorite in space. Knock it off course a fraction of an inch.

A hundred years later, it's a billion miles in a different place. Well, that's the same thing with an entrepreneur early in their lives. For me, it was getting fired the first day I ever had a job. I realized that that was just somebody else had power over me. I couldn't even deal with that concept.

And so that was the I never worked again. And with all the hardships and everything else, but it's very similar. There's some event that triggers somebody, so I'm not sure you're born with it. It's just something in your DNA says, I'm going to take that path of risk. What do you think is more important for a successful entrepreneur?

Jack Selby
To be hungry for money, to be focused on profits, increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, or to be very passionate about the product or service that you're trying to sell? Well, if you're hungry for money, I guarantee you'll fail 100%. If you start into entrepreneurship and on a journey and all you care about is getting rich, you will fail. You will fail miserably. Every entrepreneur, not some, every single one that achieved some massive liquidity event, I've talked to, and I've met many of them, they don't even remember the day it happened.

Kevin O'Leary
They just woke up and said, oh, my goodness, I'm filthy rich. But they weren't calculating for that. It's because they created something of such value that someone else said, well, we want to buy that business, and you own whatever you owned of it, and you. That's what happened to me. I woke up one day and we sold the learning company for $4.2 billion.

I was one of the founding members. I had founders shares. I wasn't even thinking about that the night before when we were negotiating the deal. And then the funny thing was, when we all came back to the office, the ten of us that were founders, we didn't know anything else except to go back to work. We didn't even know what to do.

So the only difference was we were filthy rich. Now, over time, people changed sort of their momentum and their motivation. But if you think that you can calculate the exit and that somehow you can start a business because you know you're going to sell it, make a lot of money, you will fail 100%. It's the second issue you talked about. It's the passion of loving what you do and getting up every day and working, willing to work 25 hours a day, eight days a week, because you love it so much.

You love to compete. That's how you become free. It's about. Not about the pursuit of capital. It's the pursuit of freedom, personal freedom.

I don't have to work anymore. I work harder than I ever have. I really enjoy what I do. I love to compete. I love to do what we're doing right now, talking about this, so that others may learn from my mistakes.

But the whole idea is personal freedom. That is the american dream, and you have to set your course on that. And there's one attribute you need to pull that off, and I've taught so many people. It's the ability to differentiate the signal from the noise. Every minute of the day, people are going to chase you with stuff.

You're going to get a thousand ideas. They're going to call you and ask you to do stuff. If it's not on task for the signal, it's noise. It's noise, and you have to just push it aside. Those are the great entrepreneurs.

They don't deal with the noise. Who are you competing against? It's when I start a business, for example, let's say watch insurance. I'm a big watch collector. I've looked at every single policy there is for watches.

None of them work for me. Why the problem with watches? That if you go and get a rider on your home insurance, you're going to notice when you actually read the fine print that you're going to end up, in many cases, with a depreciated value of the watch ten years later when you lose it or it gets stolen or you break it. Except the majority of watches these days go up in value, and sometimes geometrically certain brands quadruple in value. And your policy, a decade later, when that watch is out of production, can't even contemplate its market value.

So I want a policy that actually scrapes market value every 24 hours, and I can insure it for exactly what it'll cost to replace it, or I can insure it for the purchase price. I can decide myself, but I'd much rather insure my watches for what they were worth last night. So I have a policy with chubb, and it's a stated value. And I've started doing this with cars, too. I noticed it becoming a lot more common, a stated value.

Graham Stephan
And then if that watch gets lost or stolen, they replace that, I think, plus 50% up to the total policy amount. So let's say you have 100,000 in watches. One of those watches is worth 20. You lose it, it gets stolen. They'll cover that up to 30, up to the total policy limit of 100 within a certain period of time.

Kevin O'Leary
What happens if that's a steel white face Daytona that you bought for $12,000 that's now trading for 58%? Well, then you do a. A stated value of, you know, and. That 30 or 40, and that eats up how much of your. Of what you've got left for the other five?

Graham Stephan
Whatever you say. Right. So, for my. I think I have five watches. I stated values in all of them, and I stated the value based on what they're selling for on chrono 24.

If I were to replace, I would rather be policies like that. No, I get it, but I'd rather solve for a different problem. I have many watches. I only want to insure the 25 I travel with, and I want to travel maybe for a month with these to go shoot shark tank, for example. I'm going to.

Kevin O'Leary
And I'm going to put them in a bank vault in LA. I want the value of every one of those watches that day, should it get lost. And I want to be able to turn that policy off when I swap it out for another 25 watches. Maybe I only have three watches and I only want to wear one. It doesn't matter.

I want a different kind of insurance product. There's nothing wrong with what you've got, but it doesn't solve for me. If you think you're going to spend 1.72%, which is approximately what you're spending of the replacement value on your watches, I would want it to be accurate. I want to check the language regarding what theft is theft and what loss is loss, because I'm writing it specifically, specifically for watches. And lastly, does it work internationally?

Because I travel a lot and I've talked to thousands of people that are collectors of watches and they all want the same thing and they can't find it. There's nothing wrong with Chubb, there's nothing wrong with Lloyds of London. When you make something specific for just watch owners, maybe you've made a better mousetrap. The biggest challenge the watch industry has in insurance is customer acquisition. I do not have that problem.

There are millions of people who know I'm a watch collector. And when we tested this, I just put 115 2nd ad out and got requests for 2000 policies. No insurance company has ever been able to do that. So I'm pretty confident that a year from now, after I've launched this product, I'll be a great competitor and I'll make this industry better by offering a better product that people have to compete with. That's why I like to be a competitor.

I see a hole in the market, I see a need, I see something that's required, I go pursue it. For a young entrepreneur, maybe trying to impress some investors, or just a young, motivated person that wants to get into watches, what type of watch would you recommend they get as their first watch? And what do you think is the most overrated watch company that exists? Although, you know what, before we go into that, let's do some quick math. Because minimizing your business's expenses is also the same as maximizing your profits.

Graham Stephan
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Graham Stephan
Thank you again to Netsuite for sponsoring today's video. And let's get back to the podcast. For a young entrepreneur maybe trying to impress some investors, or just a young, motivated person that wants to get into watches, what type of watch would you recommend they get as their first watch? And what do you think is the most overrated watch company that exists? That's a great question because I've said to people countless times, never borrow money to buy a watch.

Kevin O'Leary
A watch should mark a moment in your life as it has for me. I remember my very first watch, Cartier Panther, that I bought on my first deal. I think it cost me at that time $5,000, which back then was a fortune to me, but I was able to afford it because I closed the deal. Collecting is actually a disease because you don't really need a watch anymore. You get better time off your phone.

But because for men and for women, too, it marks certain points in their life. I have another watch that has on the back my 1st 500 million fund. I cherish that because that's not a lot anymore. But it was my first when I got 500 million to manage, there it was. And we robot watches.

Graham Stephan
This is 2 million subscribers on it. See? On the back? Exactly. So classic Rolex on the back a mile subscribers.

Yeah. This was actually a gift from a subscriber. You would never want to lose that. Oh, gosh, never, never. And it's a very, very special piece that you will carry with pride for the rest of your life.

Kevin O'Leary
And so every single watch I have has that. But the entry levels now, and I work with all the brands. People always call me up. So why don't you endorse my brand? Why don't you wear only my watch?

I'm a dial guy. I want to work with every watchmaker. I'm a member of the New York Horological Society. I want to support watchmakers and I support, as a, like a patron, new watchmakers like Simon Britt. I'm one of his biggest buyers because I love his work.

And he's got 10,000 people who want to buy his watches, and he respects his collectors. I'm one of them. Here's some watches that I think are remarkable in terms of value and entry level pricing. Tudor. In fact, I'm wearing a Tudor right now.

Graham Stephan
Yeah, I noticed that. This is the Tudor of Miami pink. This is a $7,000 watch. But that dial is absolutely spectacular. It's beautiful.

Kevin O'Leary
So Tudor has watches down to three and $4,000, and the quality of a Tudor is remarkable. Grand Seiko, spectacular. We were looking at this yesterday. Was it yesterday in Puerto Rico? We walked in and the guy was talking nonstop about Grand Seiko, and their movements are fantastic.

Graham Stephan
The Japanese really have it down for watches. They actually started making watches before the Swiss. The quality of a grand seiko piece is unbelievable. So if you're going to buy an entry level watch, go look at what Grand Seiko? Not Seiko.

Kevin O'Leary
Grand Seiko. There's a difference. Grand Seiko is extremely affordable, and they make some amazing pieces. And those are two brands that I feel, you know, longines for women is a fantastic brand, and I support them all, and I own them all. I mean, I'm a dial guy.

It doesn't matter to me. I mean, look, this is a loose patek. It's covered in diamonds. It's a really expensive piece. That's not why I bought it.

I bought it because it's got a beautiful red band, which is my signature look. But also, the dial is spectacular. It's a crazy. But now, I would argue for entrepreneurs, they want something that's recognizable, where the average person on the street looks at a watch and says, that person is successful because they have that watch. I think Rolex is really the only brand that has that name recognition, where if you're going into a meeting, unless you're watch, like, watch people know Grand Seiko, they know Tudor.

Graham Stephan
But non watch people, I think, had the respect for Rolex as a brand of like, oh, they must be successful because they have a Rolex submariner. But who you're trying to impress is like a bidding entrepreneur, like you're trying to impress. It is true that Rolex is 40% of the market in that sense, but there are other brands. I would argue that Patek Philippe, if you talk about the Horseman of watches in terms of respect in a meeting, AP Rolex, Patek Philippe, they're well, well known. They are the three Horsemen.

Kevin O'Leary
But also, there's some brands that have come up in the last decade that are remarkable. FP journe even if you have all those watches, those are the FP journe collectors. They want a Journe. Jordan is the living Picasso of watchmaking. Everybody knows when he passes, all the watches are going to be worth way more.

Everybody's trying to get any JordaN they can get. It's transcended a micro brand. It's transcended an independent brand. It's become a brand. And that happened.

So watch collecting is really about for me, it's styles, but I love it. And it's a whole community of people. It opens stores all around the world. For me, royal families, european leadership, everybody loves watches. Last watch question, because we do have to move on.

Jack Selby
Which brand do you think is overrated? That's a really tough question, because do. You want me to say. I'll say Hublot. Hublot, yeah.

Kevin O'Leary
I mean, I get that. But Hublot has just come with some dials. The last six months, these brands go. They ebb and flow. Let me give you another example.

Richard Mill. That was the hottest, hottest, hottest, hottest brand during the crypto craze. People were buying Richard Mills with crypto, and I could never wear one because they never were allowed on television. They were just too ostentatious. And then along comes their new titanium zero one thin, super stunning dial.

And I am wearing that on shark Tank season 16. So there's a brand that I couldn't touch. Now has become iconic in terms of style with this super thin titanium watch. So you can say that about Hublot, but just you wait six months and stuff happens. It's like talking about steel versus gold.

Six, seven years ago, nobody touched yellow gold. Now it's smoking hot. And just in Geneva a few weeks ago, the best of show was what Cartier did with the crash, a watch designed back in 1921. They brought these skeleton crashes and everybody went ballistic. And that's Cartier.

And so that's a brand that you may thought was jewelry. Now, I'd say for fashion couture, when you see what's going to be on style for the rest of this year, you're going to see a ton of Cartier. Now, going back to topics when it comes to business and entrepreneurship, you talked about being comfortable enough to fire your mother. What does that mean to you? When you start a business, you're no longer number one.

You start hiring employees. They're on top of you. Your shareholders, your bankers, they're on top of you. On top of both of them are your customers. They're number one.

They'll always be number one. You are at the bottom of the stack because even though you own the business, and that's important, and that's how you'll be free one day. From that point on, you are working for everybody above you. If you use nepotism in your business and they don't perform, that's hurting all of the rest of the stack. So if you have your mother and she can't perform, and she's only on there because you want to put her on payroll for some reason, and she doesn't deliver on her promise to the team, you got to take her up behind the barn, shoot her.

You got to shoot her because you're hurting the business. And it's the business that matters the most. Not you, not any one individual. If they're not team members, they're cancer. Surgery immediately, gone.

The minute they're not on mandate, gone. I learned this lesson a long time ago. You're either on board or you're not. It seems as though the trend is to be ruthless in business. Is there ever a time to show compassion in business?

Jack Selby
Or would you say for the most part, that's giving away something that you don't need to be giving away? Let's get back to behind the barn. No, no, no. I'm very compassionate. I think great leaders are very compassionate.

Kevin O'Leary
Great managers are very compassionate. They understand people are human beings, but in business, it's very measurable, it's very binary. You either make money or you lose money. There's no in between. Break even business is not sustainable.

It's not going to work. You either make money or you lose money. Most companies can't last more than 36 months losing money because they can't raise anymore if they go out of business. So you should understand what the goal is, and people tell me all the time, well, shouldn't we have a social mission? Sure you should.

As long as you can afford it. If you don't make money, you can't pay out any social mission. You can't support any charity because you're losing money. If you don't understand that, you're probably not going to make it because businesses, the DNA of a business is actually to make money. And lots of people say, well, no, it isn't.

It's to save some social. Cause that's actually called a charity. And there's nothing wrong with that. You can't mix them up. I'm curious, how do you value your time?

Graham Stephan
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Jack Selby
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Graham Stephan
And you said, what's more replaceable, the business or her? And she, I guess at the end of the day was probably more replaceable. But how do you balance living life and enjoying things versus the pursuit of money? Well, you have to understand there's different phases in an entrepreneur's life. There is no balance in the early days, and I think you're fooling yourself if you think there is, which is why I say you better love your idea, you better love your mission, you better love your product, you better love your customers because you're going to have to spend an annoying amount of energy on it and you're not going to have a balanced life if you're successful.

Kevin O'Leary
That's when you buy your freedom and you can dial in your participation to your business by hiring more people that can execute for you. I'm a very fortunate guy today. I can do whatever I want, but it doesn't mean I didn't work like hell for it. I did. But now I pursue things that really matter to me.

I think there is a balance in life that you earn and you need it because you have to have the yin and yang. If all you do is do business all day. You will not be creative. You really, really have to balance it. You'll be creative when you have the yin and yang of chaos of art.

Let me give you some examples. I love to learn from other successful entrepreneurs. I did a guest stint with Michael Rubin from fanatics. Very successful entrepreneur in sports. He was a guest shark, and I was working with him, and he said a few times, how big can this be?

When he was being pitched deals? And I really liked that about him because he wasn't thinking small. He said, if I'm going to burn my time, it's got to be big. It may be very competitive, but it's got to be big.

About shark tank, you meet these wonderful people, and you have lunch with them and hang out and do everything else. Those five words really stuck in my mind. So I'm learning. I'm always learning from other entrepreneurs. That's one guy.

How big can it be? Just think about how important that is to ask yourself in every opportunity you see. And the other one, Elon Musk, he hates wasting time. If you're engaged in a conversation with him and he thinks it's useless information, he'll just walk away. He doesn't care about the social impact of that.

That's why he's so wildly successful. And so you got to think about that. I've seen him do that, and so people feel nervous meeting him, maybe, and they want to make small talk. That's not what he wants. What do you know?

That's useful information. That's what he wants. When does it become unhealthy? I want to give the example back. In, really, from 2020 to 2023, I was in a phase where all I cared about were what I'm doing every, like, hour of the day, and I calculate the value of my time for an hour.

Graham Stephan
And if someone were to say, let's go and grab lunch, let's go and grab a coffee, I would calculate how much that time is worth and then think to myself, do I want to pay this amount to go and have coffee with this person? And I got to the point where, like, almost everything, it just. Nothing made sense for me to do other than work, because my time was so valuable during those certain hours. But also, as a secondary example, Graham and I, we were considering getting a hotel room together, separate. And Graham was running the calculator of the cost per hour that he would have to pay if we got separate rooms.

Jack Selby
And is it worth that premium? And I think about the other, you know, stuff. It's like, okay, well, we'd have separate bathrooms. Maybe we get a better night of sleep. Maybe this.

And he's still calculating this. And this was probably four or five months ago and he has plenty of money now. So at what level do you think it becomes counterproductive? It never becomes counterproductive. I'd say you've reached Nevada.

Graham Stephan
All right. That was actually how you should operate. There's no question. Because when you have enough capital and you can start to say to yourself, well, I'm going to fly first class now because I've earned it for myself. But you earned it for yourself.

Kevin O'Leary
You didn't borrow money to fly first class. In the beginning, we used points for everybody. We were in the back of the bus everywhere. Now, if I'm going to fly to Europe tonight, I'm going to fly first class because I earned it. I earned it, but I can afford to do that.

But I am the same as you. I break my day into 30 minutes segments and I'm always looking with the people that schedule me. What's this? What's this thing in the schedule? What is that?

Why am I doing that? What am I going to get from that? That's either of interest to me that I'll learn something or is going to help one of our businesses. I wish. They're now 54.

Why am I doing that? And if it's, oh, well, they called up, they said they knew you. And I'll say, well, I don't know why I would use. My most valuable asset is my time. That's what you said earlier.

You're right. It is your most valuable asset. Now, when you use it for your family, there's. That's very valuable. But when you waste it, that is a crime because you'll never get it back.

Graham Stephan
But when is it counterproductive? Because there are some things where I will deliberate for maybe 30 minutes, price matching to save dollar 50. And then I go through this other phase where it's my time is worth more than dollar 50 and the time spent deliberating, I may as well just paid more. But then I feel internally that he. Doesn'T like getting ripped off.

Yeah, I like getting a good deal. And so when I think I'm overspending, I feel like I'm getting ripped off, in a sense. And I looked at myself ten years ago and I'm thinking, ten years ago me would look at this and not want to get ripped off. I think that's a very good instinct. I don't think you should ever give up on that.

Kevin O'Leary
People ask me all the time. You just bought that watch for $250,000. Why would you spend $250,000 on that watch? And I argue, and I have the empirical data to show it, that that is probably a better investment than putting it in the s and p 500, because that piece is a piece unique, and in ten years will be worth materially more. And I'm making that calculated risk as an alternative asset.

I actually have on my balance sheet in my portfolio, mark to market value on every single watch, because I don't want to get ripped off. I mark to market every 24 hours the value of every piece, and I know that that's something I've learned. I can look at things that I study, like watches, and know when it's a bad purchase, and I won't do it. So it's sort of keeping that in your DNA is a good thing. I don't know why it's a bad thing.

Spending a lot doesn't mean that it's a bad investment. I think it's the value of your time versus the amount that you spend. Like, even last night, the first thing I do when I look at a restaurant menu is the price and then what it is second, and I'd rather get the item that's $18 and a better deal than the other one that I kind of want a little more if it's 25. But I feel like that's a bit overpriced for the fajita. Like, I'd rather the mahi burger.

I'm 100% the same way. Because, I mean, you know, I also. You should. You should spend money on good food for your body, because that actually makes you much more productive. I don't eat crap food anymore.

None. So it's. It's. You'll see. As you get older, you realize your energy levels are so much different.

You know, either you treat food as medicine or food, or one day you'll be taking medicine because you ate shit food. Sure. Like, that's really what happened. It's bad. I mean, you should think about what you're putting in your body.

Graham Stephan
Why do you like making money so much? I don't need more money. I just like. The only measure of business and success against competition is profitability. I'll run a business for three or four years.

Kevin O'Leary
My wine business made no money for four years until we turned it profitable, and now it's wildly successful because we now ship direct to consumer in 48 states. I think I ship 2.7 million bottles a year. I figured that business out, and I don't know many people that ship that many bottles. And so I'm competing and I'm winning, and I'm making money, and I'm building a great team in wine, and I enjoy wine. If you're not making money, what are you doing?

It's a hobby. It's okay if you want to call it a hobby, but if you're actually burning hours and we've been talking about time, burning hours and making no money, why would you do that unless it's a hobby? Otherwise you're just a loser. Now, what about when it comes to body language? Back to the impulsive podcast.

Graham Stephan
You said that there's some downtime when you're filming shorts dark tank where cameras will come in, get b roll, and the contestants are just standing there. And you said that you could tell from their body language how confident they are and if they're going to be successful and if they believe in the product. What do you look for specifically, when it comes to body language? Mostly in the eyes. They.

Kevin O'Leary
If you stare at somebody, can they take it? You can stare at somebody on the shark tank set for four or 5 seconds, and they just look away and they start looking around the room. They're going to fail. They got to have. They have to have in their head that moment before they're even talking.

I am here for a reason. I've earned my way here. I'm really good at what I do. I'm going to deliver my message, and nobody is going to trip me. That's the mentality you have to have.

You're going to get fried in there. Even though you've practiced 50 times in front of a mirror, it's not the same for when the cameras are rolling. You've got all the sharks there and the dynamic that's going on. You have to be confident. And it's really in the eyes, I think, because I'm right almost 99% of the time, that's a loser.

Hasn't even said anything yet. Sure enough, they're losers. Cause they just don't have what it takes to drive. You know, there are winners and losers. That's not my fault.

It's just the way it is. And what about trusting your gut? Has that ever steered you the wrong way? Cause you're very much lead by intuition, and you kind of have a feeling if this is gonna work out or not. You don't have gut till you fail the law.

The intuition or the gut feeling is experience. That's what it is. And so I always tell this famous story about my last year of business school. This guy came in the class, always in these MBA courses, they start bringing in guest lecturers. And he came into the cohort that we were graduating a week later, and I was sitting beside a guy named Barry Nicole.

He passed away. It's really unfortunate, but I spent two years beside him, and this guy walks in, and he doesn't say anything. The lecturer introduces him, and he just starts walking at the bottom of the pit. It's like Harvard. It's a case study.

168 people in the room. He's just walked around. And then he started walking up and down the aisles, and it was really uncomfortable for everybody. Like, why is this guy not talking? And then he goes down to the bottom of the pit, and he looks up and he says, you guys think you're such hot shit.

You're going to graduate with your MBA. Aren't you smart? And you think you're going to go out and change the world. A third of you are going to fail in 36 months. You're going to get fired.

A third of you are going to go into mediocrity as consultants, and a third of you are going to work like hell for ten to 15 years and maybe make it as an entrepreneur. And I leaned over to Barry and I whispered, this guy's a real asshole. And I'm that guy today. I'm that guy. He is right.

He was 100% right. That's exactly what happened. He was 100% right. The arrogance you have when you're young and you've never felt the sting of failure is unbelievable. And only life can beat the crap out of you and make you have experience.

That's the whole idea. And that's really what I learned. And now when I go in and I give that same lecture to people, it's out of experience. And so when I see deals now and I meet entrepreneurs, or I'm offered to invest in stuff, I have a pretty good spider sense whether it's going to be successful or not. Do you think it's better to tell them it's going to fail and just say your idea sucks, you're not confident this is not going to work out?

Graham Stephan
Or do you think it's better to let them fail and go through that experience? They could learn from it? Well, that's what I do all day. That's why I'm the hated shark. I always say that idea sucks.

Kevin O'Leary
It has no merit. It's going to go bankrupt, and you're going to lose your house versus what Laurie and Barbara do. Oh, Kumbaya. You keep going. I admire what you're doing.

I'm not going to give you any money, but you just keep on going. You go, girl, you go. I lean over to them, I say, what are you talking about? This idea is shit. It's going to zero for sure.

It's disingenuous what you're doing. We have that debate all the time, and I get the rapper being the guy that tells the truth. I'm the only shark that tells the truth, and I'm your best friend because your idea does suck. It's going to zero, and you're not going to waste your time on it any longer. You'll start something else.

That's the whole idea of entrepreneurship. Maybe you try three times. You only need one success. What time were you most surprised by the pitch where you thought, okay, this is horrible, you're going to lose your house? But then it ended up being a success and there was demand for that?

Jack Selby
Before we get into that, here's a funny story, guys. I, for some reason, thought that I was a stock market investing genius. I put $20,000 into a robinhood portfolio and I brought it all the way up to $70,000 in like five months. Have you ever seen anything like that before? Those are the times, man.

Graham Stephan
2020 through 2021, anything you picked was going to go up in value. It's just that was the market at the time. But guess what happened to my $70,000? It went down to $4,000. I lost everything.

Jack Selby
It was devastating. The thing is, though, your intentions were good when it came to it. Like, you wanted to invest your money, you wanted to beat inflation. At the time, a lot of things were doing well, and it's simply a matter of just not getting the proper education to lock in profits and properly diversify. Since then, I've made a lot of money investing.

I'm investing for the long term in the right stocks. And same goes for Graham. And one of the places that I actually turn to for information happens to be sponsoring this episode, which is crazy. And that would be Yahoo. Finance.

Graham Stephan
Yahoo. Finance allows you to read comprehensive financial news, analysis, or just learn more about investing in general. It's also the website that I personally visit every single day. I get some video ideas from them. It's just a great resource to go and learn about investing, see what's going on.

And the best part about it, it's completely free. So if you guys want to learn more about investing and make sure that you're making the right decisions, unlike me check out Yahoo finance. There's a link down below in the description. Thank you so much, Yahoo Finance, for sponsoring this episode. And back to the podcast.

Jack Selby
What time were you most surprised by the pitch where you thought, okay, this is horrible, you're going to lose your house? But then it ended up being a success and there was demand for that base. Pause. I think it was 2020 or 2019. Ana Skye walks out, says, I have a cat DNA testing kit for $29.

Kevin O'Leary
And I looked at her and said, I can buy a new cat for $5. Why would I spend $29 on a DNA testing kit? What a stupid idea this is. She was so compelling. No one gave her a dime.

Except at the end of her pitch. I just thought, wow, this woman just does not stop. She is vicious. She is so focused on this idea that she can help cats live longer and that people care enough about their cats that they'll give them $29. I said, okay, I can't take it anymore.

I'll give you the 250,000. Whatever it was I gave her, I. Can'T help it anymore. I couldn't take it. 250 grand just to stop.

She was not going to leave without a deal. And so I finally, I caved. That was one of the. It was the highest irr return in shark tank history. A matter of months later, she sold it to a giant pharmaceutical.

Not because of the kits, because of the data, right? She had the cat DNA data by the hundreds of thousands. And I thought to myself, wow, even though you think you know, you don't know, that's why you got to invest in a whole bunch of deals, because it's the ones that you think are going to be great, that end up being turds and the ones that are just insane, like bass paws. What about wicked good cupcakes? What a monster hit that was.

Cupcakes in a jar. Nobody would give them a dime. Tracy and Danny, it was twelve years ago. It was the same situation. They were so compelling with their whole pitch and their story.

I thought, okay, they're just so good at telling it. Maybe someone else will like it, too. Sold to Hickory Farms. Huge hit. Huge hit.

Imagine putting a cupcake in a mason jar that shipping costs go up by three times. But that's not what their story was. It was gifting and it was really, really. So I've learned that you just don't know, and you've got to cut a lot of slack in these deals. Who knows what last year's crop is going to do in four years from now?

Who knows? What I'm going to see next week when we start again. That's why I have a lot of latitude and I don't even have to like you. I just want to figure out, can you execute like Anna in bass? Pause.

She was a ferocious beast. Her past record of execution skills was insane. She just never fails. That's the other thing. 75% of the deals for me in 15 years have been the ones that were successful, run by women.

Graham Stephan
What's different about them that makes them more focused on profit or better business? Well, we actually studied this. We went back and looked at seven years of data trying to figure this out. And what we learned was, there's something to this adage, you want something done, give it to a busy mother. Because they juggle a lot of things in a small startup company.

Kevin O'Leary
But the real secret sauce was in setting goals, growth goals that were attainable. So their average growth rate was only 17% versus the men in our portfolio, 30%. But they only hit their target 65% of the time, and women hit them 95% of the time. And I thought, why does that even matter in manifesting itself for a better cash outcome? And the answer is, nobody wanted to quit the New England Patriots when Brady was the quarterback because they had a chance of getting a ring.

A quarterback that just delivered the championship. Year after year at the Super bowl, they win Super Bowls. So women entrepreneurs that set goals that everybody achieves. The culture gets very sticky and there's no attrition, nobody quits. And small business when you lose.

Head of sales, ahead of accounting, head of logistics, very disruptive. That's sort of what the secret sauce was. So now we really reduce our growth targets to make sure we can achieve them. That's what matters. How important do you think a morning routine is?

Graham Stephan
You've got quite the early morning routine, right? You're up at four or 05:00 a.m. No, I got up this morning at five. I went down to the gym. I listened to three or four european feeds while I was working out, did some aerobics, did some weights.

Kevin O'Leary
It's a constant routine. You need that just to clear your mind, but you're also garnering a lot of data. And so I was on the road at 07:00 I gave a keynote today here in Miami, up to entrepreneurs, a room of 3000 entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed that. And here we are now, sitting talking about the same topic.

So that routine is important, particularly around mental wellness and physical wellness. And you've got to be, you got to, you know, I don't smoke. I don't take drugs. I drink wine. I like that.

That's my one curse. It's bad for sleeping. I wear an aura ring. And I've done something else, which is a little unusual, but I learned it from a bunch of guys. I'm involved in longevity.

I decided a couple of years ago to start wearing a glucose monitor, even though I'm not a diabetic, just to learn which foods spike my glucose because every DNA is different. So I learned, for example, if you drink a beer, I love beer. Youre trying to keep your glucose range between 50 and 150 because theres a, its not a theory anymore, its a proven fact. If you spend your life spiking your glucose with sugar, your propensity to develop dementia, not Alzheimer, goes up geometrically. In fact, theyve been able to arrest dementia by reducing heavy glucose loading.

Essentially, youre frying your brain with sugar. So if you understand that, you start saying, well, lets see what foods do that. Well, for me, it's beer. I go from 88 to 280 after half a bottle of beer. Well, that's really dumb.

Don't do that to yourself. Or if you eat like a lot of watermelon, boom, through the roof, a lot of grapes, you end up finding foods that you're much stabler with in terms of this mandate to maintain the range. But what happens is you lose a ton of weight, you're not even hungry, and you're just losing a ton of weight. And I lost 30 pounds and my energy level went up, my blood pressure went down. And that's the kind of thing that is just maintenance in a routine.

So I cycle every day. I work out. I really watch what I eat. And my only sin is I love my wine. How do you look the same age?

Jack Selby
Like, I feel like forever since I first found out about you. I don't even know how long ago it was, but you look exactly the same. You know, I think I was having this debate. I was in Washington, DC, two nights ago at a fundraiser and I got that same question. My mother was half lebanese.

Kevin O'Leary
She was lebanese and my father was irish. If you look at mediterranean people and their diets, you look at blue zones. They're all over the Mediterranean. Look at these islands off the coast of Greece or where I lived in Cyprus. People walk 40, 50,000 steps a day.

They eat two meals a day of salad and fish and olive oil and olives, and they don't eat any sugar in their bread. And I, I don't know. That's the secret. But I've lived, remember? I grew up that way.

That's all I knew. Living in Nicosia, Cyprus, eating lebanese food cooked by lebanese women, that I didn't appreciate it back then. But that diet is crazy healthy. Like there's. You don't eat any shit.

That's just not part of their culture. And so the same with the Italians. If you see, go to Europe and see, it's so much about what you put in your body every day. Now, look, if you want to take drugs, you want to smoke, you want to do all that crap, well, you're going to look like shit. That's what's going to happen.

So if you want to age out gracefully, think about what you put in your body and how you treat yourself. And the other thing, which sleep. Get some sleep. I wear an oura ring. I try for seven minutes.

Eleven. 7 hours and eleven minutes of sleep. And I've learned one thing, and I'll tell you right now, you got to stop drinking 3 hours before you go to bed. You just kill your rem. You kill your rem, you kill your sleep.

Look, I don't achieve that every day, but I'm telling you, I try not to drink during the week so that I have these great nights of sleep. And I think that just helps you for longevity. Good food for thought for everybody. And all of this technology is so inexpensive. Now, oura rings are this technology.

Technology would have cost you 100 grand ten years ago. They were a sponsor of our channel. I love the oura ring. It's fantastic. And the firmware updates are great.

I wear it all the time, and I'm always checking my sleep, and I snooze in limos everywhere. When I'm going between gigs, I zone out, get 10, 15, 20 minutes of sleep. Yeah. People say, oh, it's not valuable. Sleep.

Every minute of sleep is valuable. It's funny you mentioned the diet. The US diet is so terrible that in January I did the caveman diet. So I just really keto. Not keto the caveman.

Graham Stephan
So it's just like, just whole foods. Kind of like paleo. Yeah, yeah. Just one ingredient food. So, like chicken, rice, broccoli.

Kevin O'Leary
No, processed food. You gotta watch white rice. That's a very big spiker. You should move to brown rice. Yeah, I do brown.

Graham Stephan
But my point being, the first few weeks was actually really difficult because it was hard to find foods that were not processed, fried, or loaded with sugar. And when I got the diet down after about a week, and you have to be very careful about what you eat, like going out to a restaurant. I have to be. I look through what's in it, and I'm thinking, oh, I can't eat that. I can't eat that.

I can't eat that. In the first few months, though, I lost ten pounds. And it's just body fat. It's all great, right? You get energy, goes up totally.

And it was just that what we. Screwed ourselves with in America. That I've realized in the last five years. Is we put too much sugar in our bread. We dose our bread with cane sugar, which is insane, because it's the worst thing you can eat.

Kevin O'Leary
Europe, they do sourdough breads with no sugar. So when you eat a piece of bread here, you spike your glucose through the roof. You know, plain white bread is, in my view, it's. My personal opinion, is poison. I wouldn't touch that shit.

It's poison. I have to go out of my way here to find bakeries in Miami. That make sourdough bread with no sugar. I don't want any sugar. I don't want any cane sugar.

A lot of problems with cane sugar. There's too much of it. And slowly you'll see that the adoption of that kind of practice. Gets you in a much healthier place and reduces weight. But when you're in a restaurant, you're eating a loaf of bread or eating it before your meal comes, you're eating just cane sugar.

It's garbage. If you had to pick a number, how much would you pay to go back 20 years? Oh, that's a great question. I would like to do that because I would have treated myself so much differently if I could have done that. My lifestyle back then, at the peak of being an operator, I was killing myself.

I was just killing myself. I was working 21 hours a day, flying all over the world, not eating well. I weighed almost 40 pounds heavier. I wasn't sleeping at all. It was, I think, to myself, now, why was I doing that to myself?

What did that cost me? Like, it can't have been free. And so if I could somehow there would be value, how much it would be, I don't know. Because I don't want to change anything in my life. I'm pretty happy with what I got right now.

If I could. If I. If my advice to anybody in their twenties. Is think about what you're doing to yourself every day. If you kind of get hip to this, you'll live to 120 years old, and it'll be a really high quality life.

If you really think about exercise, and diet and smoking. What are you, an idiot? I mean, I used to smoke, but that you have to be a complete moron to do that. That you have to be beyond moronic. You have to want to die in a horrible way.

That is the worst thing you can do to your body. It's insane to inhale tobacco smoke. That's fucking crazy. But, you know, 20, 30% of the population does it. You got to talk to Ben Mahla.

Graham Stephan
You got to get him to quit. Do you know Ben Mala? Yeah. Look.

Kevin O'Leary
It'S such a dramatic change when you kick it. Within 90 days, you start to feel different. You start tasting things. Everybody I've talked to that's pulled it off. You got to take anything you can to stop yourself from smoking.

Graham Stephan
How much would you pay, though, to go back 20 years now? Let's just say everything is the same. It's just you today, right here, right now. Nothing has changed. But you're 20 years younger.

Kevin O'Leary
Yeah. It's priceless. I mean, there is no. I pay any amount, but can't do it. That's been.

Anybody would want to do that. Because the only way that deal makes sense is if I get to keep the knowledge I have today. You do. Okay. You would give everything.

Okay? That if I. If I could keep. If I could keep my portfolio. Your portfolio?

Keeping the portfolio. I want everything. I've. Like, I work hard for this stuff, so I've got it now. I don't want to lose any houses or anything like that.

I want to keep my planes, all guitars, watches. I want all that. I want every. It's all coming back with me. But if I could get back to years, yeah, that would be.

Of course, that's priceless. If anybody ever develops that technology, he'll be the most successful entrepreneur on earth. I'm curious, for people that do self sabotaging behavior, like smoking and drinking and eating bad food and stuff like that, do you think that they're just kind of born into that and they just, for some reason, have a biological predisposition to not really think about things critically and how things may impact them in the future? Or do you think that's because they've just grown up accustomed to eating really poor foods, which then infects their brain into that self sabotaging? I think the food thing is because they were brought up on a very high glucose diet, a high sugar diet.

High. Because if you think about people in Europe, you look at France or Italy or the Middle east, they don't have that propensity to overeat because they were never. And even alcoholism in places like France, where they introduce wine into children's diets at the age of eleven, many Europeans don't even drink at night. They drink during their main meal at lunch because they like to sleep better, not because they know, they just don't. If you look at the european style of the big meals at lunch and then there's a small repast in the evening, much healthier.

I think it's the way we've, our culture has probably made a mistake. The Japanese also look at the way they eat. I mean, they do a phenomenal job. They eat lots of protein there. I visit Japan all the time.

We have gone offside on our culture in terms of how we actually develop that culture, in terms of eating and being obsessed with food and eating the wrong food. But no one's perfect. I mean, if I were really on message and if I was really, you know, going to my own mandate about what I eat, I wouldn't drink anything. I'd stop drinking alcohol. I should, but I don't.

So that's my one crutch. So I have to moderate how much I do it and when I do it. But there you have it. How often is it during a shark tank pitch that it's not the product or service at all and everything, the person's personality, that completely ruins it? Although, you know what?

Graham Stephan
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iced that's Vanta.com iced or the link is also down below in the description. Thank you so much, Vanta, for sponsoring this episode. And let's get back to the podcast. How often is it during a shark tank pitch that it's not the product or service at all and everything, the person's personality that completely ruins it? Everyone, every time.

Kevin O'Leary
The reason you don't get a deal, it's not your product, 90% of the time, it's you. You suck. You suck. You can't communicate. You have a personality nobody wants to work with.

It doesn't look like you can take the idea and execute it. I don't have to like you, but I have to believe you can execute. And the more you peel the onion, you start to realize this person has no executional skills. I'm the only guy tells them the truth. I'll say, look, I don't think you can pull this off.

I don't think you're good enough, and I don't think you've made enough mistakes to realize that yet. And I don't think you've learned enough lessons. I have no interest in investing in you. I heard there's a therapist on set for people that have breakdowns after they're told no. Is that true?

It is true. How often does that get. Does it get utilized every time to make sure they're. Every deal. Every deal, whether it's successful or not, people should understand the.

The shark tank experience. What you see on tv is eight minutes, but they. Some of them are over an hour long, and they're very traumatic. It's a very intense thing you're doing to yourself. It's not easy.

You cannot prepare for the real pitch. You can try, but it'll never be the experience you'll achieve when you're in there and they do rehearse everything, but when those doors open for the real moment and the 20 plus cameras are rolling and the sharks are there, and, you know, it's now. It's the moment. It's very traumatic. Isn't there a chance, though, that maybe somebody has a great idea?

Graham Stephan
They have the skills. It's just they get so nervous in front of all the cameras, and knowing millions of people could see this, and maybe that just chokes them up a little bit. It's not them. It's just the situation that they've never been in before. Yes, and that's why we don't invest in them.

Kevin O'Leary
That's the whole point. I mean, you. You have to understand, when and when life offers you that moment, you got to step up. There's no optionality. There's no starting again.

There's no second chance. You either deliver it or you don't. And I've seen it happen a thousand times. I mean, it's heartbreaking, but I get over it. You got to remember, and I say this to so many people, usually around valuation issues, they come in the shark tank.

They have a great idea. Theyve delivered a fantastic presentation, great executional skills, and we want to invest or I want to invest and the valuation is ridiculous. Its just stupid. They want $100 million and they have no sales. Something ridiculous.

And I say to them, you know something, think about the moment were in. Just lets focus on this moment. Just this moment. If I do your deal and you become part of the Shark Tank family and you start this journey with 100 million eyeballs of syndication for years to come, and all of the aura of the shark tank, the relationships with retailers and international sales and manufacturing and all of that, that could change your life forever. If I don't invest in your deal, I'm going to forget who you are in 30 seconds.

You're not going to change my life. My life's already been changed. I'm done. Your deal is not going to change my life. No matter how successful it is, it's not going to change my life.

And that's our dilemma here. I am, I can change your life, but you can't really change mine. And you're quibbling over valuation. Why don't you think about that for another 30 seconds? And if you're so dumb that you don't get what I'm telling you, I don't want to invest in you because you're too stupid.

I don't know, I'm just getting a flurry. So much important man. Oh, gosh, no, no. This spam is awful. Spam.

It's like these. I do the same thing. I have two numbers. A Vegas line is my personal line, and then I have another one. The other one is TikTok phone.

Graham Stephan
What's that mean? It's a burner. You have a phone for TikTok? Yeah. We advertise like TikTok's chinese spyware.

Kevin O'Leary
We all know that. So. Wait, really? So you have your own phone for Tik Tok? Yeah, but there's nothing on here that's real, just TikTok.

Now, I have other apps I don't care about, but the real stuff is on my other phone, like all my banking information and all my personal contacts and everything else. This is full of fake shit. This is the tick. The supreme leader in China sees this phone and he thinks I live in the Antarctic somewhere. So TikTok is spyware, there's no question about it.

And that thing is going to go and get sold. I'm going to buy it, by the way. That's another. So I'm curious, pivoting, uh, really quick on the tick tock topic. I have the attitude and the belief that if they have my data, there's really nothing there that I'm worried about or concerned about.

Graham Stephan
I kind of think my data is already out there. Whatever I'm doing is already there. What could they do with it if they want to track me across websites, if I'm served? Different head, kind of. I mean, that's a.

I mean, as long as they're not like, you know, taking money from my bank account, then I kind of think, what's the. I'm not worried about it. Look, you're about 30% of the population. Other people have a different opinion. Certainly governments and countries.

Kevin O'Leary
Now, India was the first to turn it off. Just turned it off five years ago. 207 million users just turned it off. 48 hours later, nobody cared. Same thing could happen here in January.

Our government's made a decision. The us government said, this is spyware. It's illegal after January. The perverse situation that companies management is in right now is pursuing the people of the United States through their congress. I feel sorry for that guy's resume down the road.

Graham Stephan
How much of though do you think this is? Purely the United States doesn't want to compete with China and that they feel like China's maybe too much of a threat to the United States infrastructure. And maybe that's the reason why. Because I've seen people make the argument that Facebook is doing the exact same thing, but we don't quite regulate Facebook to the same degree. I know national security.

I kind of understand that, but I read it differently. I mean, I don't agree with your premise. I think what the United States wants, and certainly I want, is a level playing field. I'm happy to compete with China if I have the same level playing field on policy that they have. For example, I can't sue them when they steal my ip.

Kevin O'Leary
I can't if my business is being threatened to be shut down by Chinese, which they don't even allow in the first place. You can't do a TikTok in China. It has to be controlled by the government. I can't sue them. There's no Congress to sue.

There's only the supreme leader. And yet they have the benefit of bringing their companies and putting them on the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, and they're opaque in accounting and compliance. I have to pay millions for my companies that are listed companies. I have to be compliant with the SEC and the regulator. I have to pay for that.

They don't. I'm sorry, I'm come to the end of my tether on that one. My idea is that China understands the stick. I don't want, I love the chinese people. I don't trust their leadership at all because I've lived through what they've done.

I want them to be treated the same as they treat us. And I want it to be equal, level playing field. So I think that we should delist their companies until they comply under the same rules. I have to, I say they don't have access to our courts if I can't have access to theirs. So this guy that's suing Congress, I think we should just say, nah, sorry, we can't sue the supreme leader.

You can't sue us. I think that company will be shut down if it isn't sold. I actually think they're going to shut it down in Canada, too. I think they're going to shut it down in Europe. They're going to shut it down everywhere.

Graham Stephan
What do you think the role of. The government should be to provide a regulatory environment? I think we saw this happen with crypto, which is a good recent example, a level playing field where all competitors can compete. Now, people have different versions of what they want from government, particularly around healthcare and other sectors. But when it comes to the largest, theres eleven sectors in the economy and many of them are regulated.

Kevin O'Leary
My preference is to simply set the rules so you can play the football game. Thats it. What you want is policy. Thats pro business, pro job creation, and then let people compete, because thats what created the american economy over 200 years ago was this idea of capitalism and competition. I think weve swung too far the other direction where its too much of a nanny state.

And im not pro Trump, you know, or against Trump or it's not even, forget partisanship. I don't care. I don't care who you like as a politician. What I like is good policy. I've never made money in politics.

I've made money understanding where policy will go. If I understand policy, I can make sectoral bets. And I've been pretty successful really reading policy. Look, I read the Chips and science Act. I read the IRA.

Like, I actually read what the government's doing to understand who will benefit from that and then go invest in those sectors. It's public information. And I spend a lot of time on the Capitol Hill. I mean, I spend at least a week, a month now in Washington because I care so much about policy. It gives me a competitive advantage to understand policy.

And I'm very fortunate. I have something called the shark tank passport, it gets you in everywhere. I haven't met a politician on either side of the aisle that doesn't like american entrepreneurship. I haven't met a leader, a world leader anywhere that doesn't love shark tank and entrepreneurship in their country. And I mean, everywhere.

It could be united arid Emirates. It could be, you know, Doha in Qatar. It could be France. It doesn't matter. The shark tank passport has been giving me an opportunity to really drill down into policy.

And so the role of government is really to be pro entrepreneur. That's what I believe, because that's where all the wealth of America came from, creating jobs. And so it's very defined. Look, this policy is bad for business, and I don't like it. It doesn't matter if it's red or blue.

It's bad policy. Think a lot of people make the argument, though, that the middle class is shrinking because some of these policies and that the rich keep getting richer. And these last four years, I think, were a good example that if you had assets and you had investments, you did phenomenally well. And if you didn't, you were hit hard by inflation and policies that maybe made it more difficult for you to get ahead, more difficult to save money. Yeah.

And the natural reaction to that is, well, we should tax those people more. On their unrealized gains, which every country. That'S tried that, including France and England, that was a miserable failure. I mean, people just took their assets out of the country, and it just crushed growth. I mean, you can't even measure it.

It's so difficult. It's very popular these days to say, tax the rich, but the rich already pay all the tax. That's the truth. There's not enough rich people to tax them into prosperity anymore because you lose them. You should never penalize somebody for being wildly successful, creating millions of jobs.

In the case of Elon Musk or in the case of Amazon, where Bezos people want to pursue him, these guys created the american economy as we know it. And I don't know why we'd want to punish them for that. It's very populist point of view, but I'm against that kind of thing. The majority of us that are entrepreneurs just want to create a business and do well and keep our families well off, if we can, and educate our children. That is the american dream.

And the more the government gets involved in it, the less it happens because government spending is very inefficient. I'd like to see less of it. So we asked this question to everybody, and I'd love to hear your take on this. If you're living in America between the ages of 25 and 60 and you're. Poor, is it your fault and you're bored?

Graham Stephan
Poor? Oh, poor. I thought you said bored. You're poor and you're poor. No, you got TikTok.

Jack Selby
If you're bored, I would say yes. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin O'Leary
No, it's not. It's a setting of your circumstance. You know, it's. The answer to that question has been forever. Education, where people are underserved in America, is the opportunity to get educated, because that actually determines outcomes more than anything else.

If you find yourself poor, some large portion of that is because you didn't have the opportunity to be educated. We don't invest enough in our teachers and our schools and the system of education, the most basic things in advancing reading and math scores, because that's the way we lock the door on you. If you can't read and you have low math scores, you can't go through the education system. I know that from my days in learning company. We spent so much time developing math and testing software.

I think if you have to be poor, you have to start. You land on the planet. Better way to answer your question, which country on Earth would you like to land in? If you start with nothing, you come out of space with nothing. No clothes, even, and you just.

It's like the Terminator. You just. You're just there. I don't think there's any country better than the United States of America to just drop out of space being naked. Because if you have the skills, you have the desire, you have the interest, and you have the ability to execute, within years, you'll be wealthy.

Graham Stephan
Why do you think common sense is not taught in schools of just budgeting, finance, just being a good person, knowing how to take care of yourself? It doesn't seem like any of these topics are taught. And that was one of my issues in school, was that every topic that I learned, I had a really difficult time paying attention to, because I thought to myself, this is never going to apply to me. I'm never going to be a physicist if I'm interested in business. There was nothing for me in high school that piqued my interest.

Kevin O'Leary
That's a good question. However, it is changing financial literacy, which is the weakest portion of our, you know, talk about going back to being poor. The number one reason for bankruptcy is you start taking on debt when you're in your late teens. Our system wants to give you a credit card when you're 18 and you don't understand how that works, and you end up building a big balance at a 21% interest. We dont teach people about that in schools, and I think the great news is its changing.

The state of Florida started introducing that into high school curriculum, financial literacy. And other states are picking up Texas, New York, California. I think we can fix that problem. I think school is really trying to find out who you are and find out what youre passionate about. Same with college.

Youve got to find something that really turns your crank to get up in the morning. Some people pursue a life of philanthropic work. Working with charities, that's fine, too. Whatever you like. You want to be a writer, you want to be an artist.

We provide you with that opportunity. In America, we have eleven sectors of the economy. One thing I have seen, for example, in the last five years is I used to say, if you want to get a job, just be an engineer. Engineer or engineer. It's not true anymore.

Our fastest growing expense are artists, people that tell stories on social media, videographers, sound editors, you know, story writers, cameramen, soundmen. I mean, they, we spend, we spend millions every month across the gamut of all our companies just producing content for social media. Those people, I used to pay 38,000 a year. Now some of them make 250,000 because I have to compete against people that pull them aside because they can make their own job and get 80 to 100 grand themselves as influencers, you know, obviously you figured that out. Yeah.

Graham Stephan
What about social programs? What do you think the government should offer to people who maybe don't have the capacity to work to that degree or maybe fall on really hard times and need something to hold them together? My definition of social programs is education. So if you're looking to change your life, you have to learn another skill. That's education.

Kevin O'Leary
It's not really social work. I mean, we have a lot of mental illness problems here. I get that. Education is the key, is to train people to work in the new digital sectors. That's what the government should do with my taxpayer dollars.

Jack Selby
What do you think the tax rate should be? Imagine you're president, you can decide what the tax rate is. Is it progressive? Is it the opposite? Regressive?

Is it flat? Yeah, it's flat. 29.5% for everybody? For everybody? Everybody.

29.5? Yeah. How do you come to that number? You know, there's two things I would do if I were president. One is I'd go to the flat tax for everybody, including corporations.

Kevin O'Leary
29.5. I don't think you'd have companies contorting and leaving at 29.5. Some people feel it's 22, but it's somewhere between 22 and 29.5. You don't want to put a three handle on it. Sounds too high.

But the other thing I would do is take the lesson from Norway back in the mid seventies. They have vast resources of fossil fuels, as we do here. They simply put a royalty on it with one covenant. It could not be used for any other purpose except building up a trust fund, could not be used for anything else, could not be used for social programs, cannot be used by government to spend. In Alberta and Canada did the same thing.

Norway did theirs with a covenant that could only be used to pay down national debt or build a trust fund. Today, Norway is the richest per capita country on earth. Canada, unfortunately is the wealthiest per capita on earth in terms of natural resources per capita. But it's run by idiots. So huge difference is what has occurred is two examples.

They have a trillion plus dollars sitting in their trust fund and they use it to develop their country and educate their people in the US. What we should do is open up every source of gas and oil, including the Anwar, and put a 7% royalty on it. With only one mandate, it has to pay off national debt. That's all you can do with it. Do you think that would even make a difference though?

Graham Stephan
I worry you do. Oh my goodness. The idea that we're going to transition out of fossil fuel anytime soon I find laughable. There's no transition, there's just diversification. We'll be using fossil fuel for another 100, 200 years.

So this is something we're talking to Peter Schiff about in terms of the national debt and then propping up the stock market and the housing market. Do you think that's the case? And do you think that we could essentially just in perpetuity, continue printing money? How long could that continue? No, we can't.

Kevin O'Leary
But we also have a solution. We have to continue growth with a moderate tax rate. So we have a GDP growth of north of 3%. That's how you pay down your national debt, but also do what Norway did, say, okay, we're going to do this mandate on fossil fuels. We're going to provide the world with fossil fuels and we're going to just pay down our debt with it.

That's it. You could take a big chunk of it, maybe 20% away in the next ten years. You said most of the tax is paid by the ultra wealthy, and I'm sure that comes to a surprise to a lot of people, they're under the impression that, like, they hear, oh, Amazon only paid like, a effective 2% tax rate, or Elon Musk paid 8%, but he's got billions of dollars. How do you square that? It's not factual.

Wealthy people pay billions of dollars in taxes as well, and they also provide a massive amount of philanthropic donations because they're incented to do that on a tax basis. They pay it in capital gains, mostly, not in income. That's the big difference. So they may go years paying no tax, and then when Elon Musk takes out 45 billion to buy Twitter, he paid a ton of tax on that because he turned it into cash and he finally paid his tax. And so that he's probably was the highest taxpayer in the country that year.

But it's big bursts of tax they're paying, but they still pay a ton of tax. If you could partner with one entrepreneur for a venture, who would it be? It'd be Mister wonderful. I love that guy. No question.

That guy really understands deals. He's got it. Yeah. They're always saying, which shark do you want to partner with? I partnered with a guy I love.

He's Mister wonderful. He's the best. That's it. What do you think of the dollar 20 California minimum wage? Huge policy mistake.

You're going to see a lot of restaurateurs shut down. You can't minimum your wage into success. All you do is push out business because they can't compete. That was also an unfair policy because certain restaurants really affected fast food. Certain restaurants had to pay it, others didn't, which is such stupid policy.

California is actually the worst managed state in the union. I would never invest there. It's a loser state. And it's been that way for a while. And you can see the collapse of cities like San Francisco and now La.

San Francisco is a war zone. I mean, you don't walk around there at night. It's completely in disarray. And I think a good example of what happens when you don't have good management. What do you think the minimum wage should be?

I don't believe in a minimum wage. I think the market decides.

People don't work if they can't make ends meet. They go find jobs where they get paid more. If you let the market decide, you get a much more efficient economy. The minimum wage is a concept that's foreign to me because all it does is contort business. I think you'd make more money without a minimum wage.

You would. Particularly if you're good at what you do. How do you feel like AI is going to be affecting that? Because we noticed even in New York, we went to a sushi restaurant, and it was almost entirely automated. They had a little iPad on the side.

Graham Stephan
You press on what you want and a conveyor belt brings out the food to you. You could check out there. It's really efficient. McDonald's in Japan, go to the kiosk, you type in what you want, someone breaks down. I think a lot of people were always fearing, you know, that television would replace radio.

Kevin O'Leary
Good analogy. Never happened. I mean, the next technology just advances. It's just a tool. It's not going to wipe out mankind.

I always thought that narrative was ridiculous. It'll take boring jobs and make them redundant for humans and let humans do other things with more creativity involved. So I really think that AI is just another tool set and way overhyped. It's like the Internet was in the early nineties. It's being overhyped right now.

It will not deliver on all its promises, and it'll get stabilized as a tool in many other platforms. Where do you see it going in 20 years from now? It'll just be an added feature to the software you use every day. Maybe we have fully automated driving, maybe we don't. Maybe it's some kind of a derivative of it.

I see a lot of good use of it. We're using it ourselves in our businesses, but I just think it's a tool and it. But by then it'll be just normal day to day. I tend to think that it's going to eliminate a whole bunch of jobs. I was thinking the other day, how cool would it be if you're building a house to type into an AI program?

Graham Stephan
Build me a house or construct a house that conforms to code. It already knows what the city regulations are, and it builds you the blueprints of a house that you could look through online, and it just does it with AI, and you could alter it a little bit. It knows it could source all the materials, it could price them for you, and all you got to do is give that to a person and they just build it. So I think it could eliminate a lot of. I think it's doing that already in house building.

Kevin O'Leary
I think there's a lot of logistics being used in shipping. We know that. I think it's already a very useful tool. And by the way, it's been around longer than people think. It's just been made famous because it's now on your cell phone.

But I don't see the dark ending of society because of AI. I just don't buy that crap. It's just another technology. Why does it seem like everyone is so bearish on civilization right now, especially in the United States? Like, everyone thinks that we're doomed to fail.

Jack Selby
It seems like, you know, mental illness is just skyrocketing. Depression, anxiety. It seems as though divorces are happening more often than not. I think it's like over 50% still, right? It's gone down.

Graham Stephan
But those are for like 2nd, 3rd, 4th marriages. People are still financially suffering or seemingly. So what do you think is something that everyone is ignoring and just not thinking about that they should if they're trying to wake up from this? A lot of people blame social media, particularly with young people giving them anxiety. I don't really buy that.

Kevin O'Leary
It's the same as Elvis shaking his hips on tv in the sixties. We go through different cycles in our society where the next generation shows up. Maybe this generation feels entitled because they actually grew up at a time when money had no cost, interest rates were zero. Now they're feeling the staying of, of a normalized fed. That does impact all sectors.

So probably it's a little bit of that. I don't really worry too much about the day to day. Oh, I think we're all screwed and society's screwed, and AI is going to wipe us out. I don't buy any of that. I really don't.

I think that we're just in a cycle of change, constantly changing. And the one thing that has accelerated that change is the fact that social media is ubiquitous. So when something occurs someplace, you're going to see it times a million times. It'll go viral in seconds. And I'm not concerned about that either.

It's just what we have in our technology today. I just don't spend that much time worrying about this stuff, because it's really. It's noise. As I said earlier, it's not signal, just noise. It seems as though you're interested, at least from our last conversation a few years back, in relationships, that was what we actually talked about a lot off camera.

Jack Selby
I'm a single bachelor living in Vegas, 25 years old. Graham's getting married soon. Congratulations. Thank you. Very soon, actually.

So he's got a lovely fiance. Do you have any advice for either of us or for people listening right now that want to improve their relationship or find a relationship? I wrote a book a few years ago called men, women, money, and I did some research with some divorce lawyers trying to figure out, why is it that 50% of marriages end in, you know, it's failure. And I thought it was about infidelity, but it's not. Most marriages can survive infidelity.

Kevin O'Leary
What they can't survive is financial stress. So in marriage, what turns out to really matter is that you both share the same financial goals, and one doesn't outspend the other and go into bankruptcy. And I think a lot of due diligence is not done because people are in euphoric state of love when they should be asking questions about, where'd you come from? How much debt do you have? Are you bankruptcy in your family?

Are you bankrupt? Just asking what's. Because you find that out anyways after you've been married a few years. But if you don't have a stable plan for building a family pillar around stable finances, you're going to fail. You already are failing 50% of the time within seven years.

Jack Selby
So what are the questions that you should ask and how soon should you ask them? Because I'm guessing if you're on a first date and you just ask, what's your credit score? That might be a bit of a turn off. Maybe not. Definitely not for Graham.

Graham would love to ask, but when do you bring up these questions? Third date, second glass of wine, you have a mattress. Third date, second glass of wine. I'll tell you why. By the time you've got to a third date, both sides are interested.

Kevin O'Leary
And you really, you start to feel that way on the second date, but you don't want to press, too, you know, hard issues on the second date, you're still kind of getting to know each other. Third date, now you're. You're really starting to think, well, is this person going to be part of my life? In one way or another? It's a great time to introduce the idea that you care about that, to see what reaction your significant other has.

If you can't talk about money with them or they freak out, you're not going to have a fourth date. That's my guess. You got to have something in common regarding financial stability, and that's the right time to have the conversation saying, I'm really interested in you. I was just wondering how you think about money. Let's talk about money.

Jack Selby
But don't you think it's a good thing if one person's really financially responsible? One person isn't, and you can teach them, because then it would be bad for everyone if just financially irresponsible people are just getting together and then having kids and teaching that to them. And who cares? Who cares more about financial responsibility? Do you find it's men or women care more?

Kevin O'Leary
Yeah, they're smart. They understand it's not gonna work if there's no money. I mean, it's that simple. I don't agree with that idea. You can teach them.

They may have bad habits, bad spending habits that came from years ago. You can't change. You know, you really. It's really worth doing diligence in that area, because later, when it affects you, it really destroys lives. You have collectors of debt, losing assets, losing houses.

It's all bad. It's all bad. And so it's better to just resolve that, saying, look, if you believe in the same way I do, I'd like to control our spending. Maybe when they will move in together. Whatever.

Any conversation you can have about money, if they don't want to talk about it, that's a huge red flag. Huge red flag. What if they have massive debt? Find someone else.

Graham Stephan
And how do you know when to settle down? I think it just comes naturally, really. If you want to have a family, you really don't want to go too late. I mean, you know, I didn't get married till I was 36. That's pretty late.

Kevin O'Leary
But we had kids right away. The one thing I would have changed in my life if I could have, I would have got married a lot earlier, a lot younger, and had more kids sooner. That would have been better, because now I really realize the value of that, and the family is so important. But you don't know that when you're young and you keep pushing it off. But that's why you're seeing a reversal in trend.

You're seeing a lot of people getting married in their early twenties now. They kind of figured it out. They want to go back to the way it was. Is it. So I'm getting married, 34, and I don't want kids for another, like, few years at minimum, just because I kind of feel like I want your wife.

Graham Stephan
She'll be 26. Yeah. Okay, so she can wait a few years. But, you know, you also want to be alive when they make high school. It's sort of.

Right? You want to kind of. Yeah, but if I could live until 120, I feel like I've got plenty of time. Just in case you don't. It's the idea that you probably want to have some kids by the time you're 36.

Kevin O'Leary
If you just look at the clock of how it works and the amount of energy it takes to raise two kids, even if you know there's a lot of energy, particularly if the wife is going to stay home or maybe not, maybe you do, it doesn't matter. But the amount of energy is a lot, a lot, a lot. People don't realize it until they're in that 2nd, 3rd year. You have one kid that's four and one that's two. That is maximum energy.

It is just a burden. What's difficult specifically about that, you need. To take care of them. Twenty four seven and they have a lot of energy and their personalities are growing and they're starting to explore the boundaries of you. Parenting is very tough for a lot of people and they don't get how this works and they never had the experience.

Best thing is you can bring someone who knows. That's why grandparents are so important. They say, well, that's what you don't want to do about that or you want to do about this. Families work, you know, that's why it's great to have kids in a broader family environment because you'll find a lot of knowledge from people that have done it before. And a lot of stress in marriages happen on that first child when you realize, wow, there's this person here every day and we don't get to do the stuff we used to do.

And you did forego that. You have sacrificed it but for the benefits of gains down the road one day. And what are those gains? Is it purely, well, it's very enjoyable. To have a family.

It's very enjoyable to work with one. It's great to watch your kids grow up. All these things are things you don't know until you do them. And so, you know, it's, it's just experience. You ask anybody and sometimes you have a, you know, not a great family.

That can happen too, where, you know, kids go rogue or whatever or they're entitled and it's a bad outcome. But generally speaking, it's, it makes life interesting. And that's why money alone in later years without any family is kind of lonely. You can buy anything you want, but you have no family. Kind of sucks.

Jack Selby
What advice would you give guys in relationships to keep the relationship steady, to keep your partner in love with you. Have you heard of the term mental load? Yeah, I have a single word. Listen, listen, listen. Yeah.

Kevin O'Leary
If you don't listen to your spouse and you don't consider their ideas, you'll get divorced. Because if, you know, you just, that is a problem. You have to have a two way street no matter what kind of relationship it is. Gay, married, whatever. You gotta listen.

You gotta let them be who they are. You gotta listen to what they want and they have to listen to you. If you can't do that, there's no mutual respect. It'll collapse for sure. Issue that I have with that is that sometimes I'll listen, but I'll wanna provide solutions.

Graham Stephan
And I'm like, oh, that's an easy problem to fix. Just do this. And it's like, no, but, you know, I wanna talk about it. That's a style problem. That's a style problem.

Kevin O'Leary
But really, listening does matter. You learn it the hard way. You've got to listen. And if, you know, the great thing about a long relationship is you don't suffer the traumatic turmoil of divorce, which has monetary issues. It's got family issues, it's got all kinds of stuff.

People don't consider what divorce is like five years later, particularly if there's kids. I've got lots of divorced friends. They're not that happy. And they almost reconsider going back because they just realize it's nowhere near as good as it, even though it was bad. But it's a weird thing.

Divorce is quite traumatic. And I know people have been divorced three times. They're not good at being married, so they shouldn't do that. Do you give advice to people who come to you and say, hey, we're thinking about getting divorced? Do you ever interject?

I do. I get lots of people calling me. I try and give the advice that I think I should give. I'm not really a divorce counselor, obviously, but I've seen it so much and I've lived through it so many times and every family has the same thing going on. I just give them pragmatic advice.

It's a cool down period. Separate for a couple of years or maybe a year and just get some space between you and see how you like that. And then very often, you'll see people get back together again. Look, being married is not easy. It's a total pain in the ass.

I mean, but it beats the alternative. What's so difficult about it? It's the amount of work that is required to maintain the relationship that over time, you may resent because you're not single anymore. And if you resent it, it's because you're not helping each other enjoy each other's company. It should be fun to be together.

And the minute it's not fun, you have to have to ask yourself, why is this not fun? Why am I loathing going home, sitting in this bar, drinking, and I'm not going home, or I'm screwing around on the side. Why am I doing that? That's the real question you should ask yourself, what is it about my partner that I didn't see or I don't like, I don't want anymore? And very often that answer is financial.

Jack Selby
You know what's interesting is we had a divorce attorney on the podcast a while ago, and he said that people never resent their dog, even if their dog goes and poops on the carpet or throws up somewhere or is barking at night. You never grow resentment. You're just like, oh, there's toodles. The in toodles. But for some reason, we grow resentment for our partner, even for our best friends, it's kind of hard to grow resentment for them because you just seemingly, there's like an inner peace, an inner bond, but with our actual partner, our soulmate, for some reason, resentment grows.

Kevin O'Leary
Yeah, because people can talk to each other and say hurtful things. Dogs don't talk. They generally like their owners because the owner feeds them. I mean, there's a great symbiotic relationship there of survival. It's different with men and women, or men and men or women and women.

It doesn't matter.

You're in a constant dynamic all the time, every day. Twenty four seven. And this is true. A successful marriage should be defined by you want to be with your spouse 51% of the time. That's a very successful marriage.

If you only want to be with your spouse 49% of the marriage or time you're going to get divorced. It's that fine line of majority. People tell me, I'm so happy. All I want to do is be with my spouse. I've been married 50 years.

That's complete b's. It's become part of your life. You're happy with that part of your life, and you've come to the realization, this is my fabric versus I'm so miserable. I am always miserable, and I'm just never happy the majority of the time, which is when you're only 48, 49% happy, you should get divorced because you can get a better life. Kind of a random question, but I feel like for a lot of people that are in the current dating pool, they're under the impression that you need to go out and you need to date a bunch of people and gather all of these data points of what you like, what you don't like, and then apply that to a certain function, and then with that function, you then can go out into the dating marketplace and find exactly who's right for you.

Jack Selby
Do you disagree with this notion? And do you think that people are turning love too much into a science? Or do you think it's more so of like, hey, you find someone that's decent and you make it work. The latter, find someone that's decent, make it work. I think that first part's all bullshit.

Kevin O'Leary
That's never going to work. When you find the right one, you'll know it. It's just, you know, it's never. You're passionately in love. You can't believe how lucky you are.

That works for like a month. It's sort of like, this is a relationship that I'm in that's better than being alone, and I'm going to stick with this. I'm going to make it work. And the significant other has to feel the same way. It's an investment.

You're investing in time, you're spending time, and you're developing something together. And it's also money. You've got to start thinking about, how are we going to financially support this union if it grows into a family? How do we do that? You don't have a plan for that.

You're going to fail and you're going to get divorced. As I say, the majority are always financial stress, not fidelity issues. You know what's interesting is that I feel like relationships are very similar to businesses. They both require a lot of attention to detail. You need to know it inside and out very thoroughly.

Jack Selby
And yet I feel like entrepreneurs. A lot of the times suffer in relationships. Why do you think that is? Well, it's true. They are.

Kevin O'Leary
Families are actually businesses. They really are. They're businesses. And some families are successful, some aren't. The person sitting at the table you never see is money, because if you're sitting around the table, you don't have any money, you don't have a family, can't keep it together.

It's very, very hard. Very hard, because you have to provide to say that it's all about love and no money. That's complete b's, too. You have to plan to have some kind of financial stability, otherwise you'll fail. It's, you know, it's really, really tragic to see people that don't get that joke early on in their marriage and get divorced for the only one reason.

They just didn't have a financial plan. That's it. So you talk about being in the business of marriage as well as. Or of divorce as well as the business of death. Right.

Jack Selby
Divorce. So those are two businesses I do invest in marriage. It's one time in your life where you don't care about gross margin on product services. People overpay for everything. At weddings, it's just insane.

Kevin O'Leary
And also in death, it's another time when you don't care so much about the price of something. If you want that coffin, you want that coffin. So I'm an investor in both sides, coming and going.

I have this amazing business run by two women called hello Preno. It empowers women to create their own prenups online. And I. It's been wildly successful. I knew when I saw them in shark tank that they would be if I could help them get the message out and acquire customers.

But they are the essence of success in marriage. Because what we're learning is when you go get the hello Prenup download, it forces you due diligence. Your partner. You can't do a prenup without asking questions. And in that.

In that journey, in that process, you learn things you like or you don't like, but it certainly gets you to a place where you have a prenup in place, particularly maybe cohabitation agreement. If you're not going to get married, you move in. And many people that go through this dynamic, this process, realize that they're with the wrong person, which is, I feel like I'm doing a great thing for them to identify that early, before they go through marriage and then get divorced. It's an amazing product. Holoprene up.

And every woman should use it. Because you should never go into a marriage with the assumption that you're going to be dependent on your husband's checking account. You should never give up your banking relationships. You should keep them your whole life. Women should have their own credit cards, their own bank accounts, their own credit history, because divorce happens enough that if you divorce after losing all of your credit history and you're in your forties, our society doesn't treat you well.

It's very hard. What do you say to the people who say it's unethical to maximize profit on death? No, there's competition in death. There's thousands of funeral homes. Most people reach out to a professional.

We have a company called parting stone, which takes over 50% of death, now ends in cremation, and you end up with an urn. And people want to have some of the ashes. So parting stone crystallizes the ashes into a stone, and you can hand out up to 60 of these to your family members that's really cool, very successful, and it's really a product sold by funeral homes. So, in fact, one of my good friends died years ago, and every year we have a lunch for him with one of my bankers, and I'm the only guy left with his ashes, and everybody wants the urn all the time to take it away for a few weeks or whatever. And I said, yeah, I got to solve this problem.

Parting stone is the answer. Last question. What's the one thing that people don't know about you that you'd like them to know? I can't make everybody happy, so I don't try. I just don't try.

You start to realize when you start getting a lot of people following on social media. The first million, the second million, the third million, I'm over 9 million now. I don't know how many I've got anymore. There's always the lunatic fringe of two and a half percent that are saying very, you know, damaging things and being very crazy. I couldn't give a shit.

I just don't care because I know there's nothing in my power that I can do to change their minds, and I shouldn't waste any energy trying to. And so that forces a certain purity in your messaging. And my strategy has been now, in just the way I lead my life, is, here's the truth. You know, I'm just going to tell you what I think. You don't like it.

I don't care. And the reason I don't care is it's still the truth. It's going to be the truth in ten minutes, in a month, in ten years, in 20 years, but it's still the truth. And it comes from this lesson I learned decades ago from my mother. She said, when I was a teenager, always tell the truth, and you'll never have to remember what you said.

That made a lot of sense to me until I started telling the truth and getting people crapping all over me, and I thought, it's still the truth. Let's see what happens a year from now or two years from now. And then, over time, I got that reputation as the guy that is really mean. But that didn't change anything either. I don't want people to like me.

I want them to respect me. So if you say, I want everybody like me, you can never achieve that goal. But if you want people to respect you, all you have to do is tell the truth. And they will, over time, come to that realization that, well, I didn't like what he said, but it was the truth. And so I don't have to worry about him in the sense that he's going to lie to me.

I don't like him, but he tells the truth. And that's kind of where I land, and that's, I think, where I sit in the continuum of personalities that people know. And by the way, it served me very well in business, it really has, because I don't lie to people. And when I'm negotiating with them, I say, well, I'm never going to do that deal. Here's why.

And there's nothing you tell me that would change my mind. But if you do this and you know that I'm not, that I'm telling you the truth and I will do it if you, you know, it's sort of like, here's a bunch of things that I'll do, and this is true. That's a much easier way to negotiate with somebody. Way easier than stringing them along or giving them some b's story or telling, because you're going to get found out anyways. The best way to draw this analogy is this.

Think about it this way. This will serve you so well in love, which we were talking about so much. When you first meet that person that you're so euphorically madly in love with, the thought of cheating on them is not even remotely in your mind. And then you get married, and seven, eight years go by one night, you do that awful thing. You just cheat on.

You have a decision to make. And here's your decision. This person that I have 100% equity with, that I've been in a marriage with, and I have never cheated on. Right? Do I lie to them by not telling what I did last night or just hoping they never find out?

Or do I wake up, call them and just hit them with the truth? Which is the better path? And I'll tell you what the better path is, because I'm going to draw the analogy for business. If you tell the truth on your own incentive, you get up and you tell them, I did something crazy last night. I got drunk in a bar and I slept with another woman.

I feel so bad about it because you have to tell the truth. The reason you're making the call is you just realized that you broke that trust, that which is hard to do, and you don't want to do it. And you're looking at your phone, oh, I don't want to call, or I don't want to do it, I don't want to call him, whatever. Versus I'm going to forget about it. And I'm just going to hope that nobody finds out.

I guarantee you they will find out. It could be two years, could be three years, could be four years, could be two months. And when they find out that way, you will lose 50% of the equity in that relationship forever. They will never completely trust you ever again, ever. There's nothing you can do to repair that damage.

All because you were so weak that you couldn't make the call on your own. If you had done that, yes, there would have been damage. But the fact that you were honest with them builds so much back that you can repair that marriage. Now, you will not necessarily get divorced just because you told the truth, but you will never have the same relationship with your significant other ever again. Same in business.

The first time you lie to somebody and they catch you in that lie, whether it be someone in your company or someone you're negotiating with or some random person, they will tell others what happened, and your reputation is irreparable. There's nothing you can do to fix it because you are a liar. The hardest thing to do is always tell the truth. But look at the path I just gave you for success on this. You have to pursue the truth because it protects you against damage you can never repair.

That's the whole point. That's the whole point. You can't fix it. Once you lied once, there's nothing you can do. You will always be the liar to an ever growing number of people you don't even know.

Because that story will get around. Great business leaders. Great business leaders are known for their honesty. Even though it's painful. People say, I trust them.

I trust her. Same thing in marriage, same thing in business. That's the best way to end this. Wow. Thank you, Kevin.

Jack Selby
That was amazing. Edge of my seat. Thank you so much. You're getting married. You better listen.

Graham Stephan
Thank you so much. I'll link to all of your information in the description. That's great. That's great. It's been a pleasure.

Jack Selby
Thanks for inviting us into your home. Lovely home, by the way. I mean, this view is. I mean, it's hard for me not to. Yeah.

Kevin O'Leary
You know, I'm never gonna be tired of this view. I love to watch people on the beach. I like to go on the beach. I'll be there later. There's sand in the elevator in here.

I love it. Don't give out the address. No, thank you. Till next time.

Graham Stephan
Till next time.

Jack Selby
Till next time.

Kevin O'Leary: "The BIGGEST Myth About Money That Keeps You POOR!"

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1: Introduction

2: The Entrepreneurial Illusion

3: Building Sustainable Wealth

4: Challenges and Realities

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