Producers' Pick | Kevin O'Leary aka Mr. Wonderful

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Sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at Shopify dot com slash offer 22 all lowercase. A radio show like no other is Brian Kilmeade. TikTok's presence and its influence and its ability to scoop up Americans data and use it. And the fact that that data is vulnerable to the Chinese Communist Party is something that everyone now has to admit. Even though the TikTok CEO won't admit it, it's obviously true. This is not only a vector for invading Americans privacy, it's a vector for the Chinese Communist Party to insert its influence into our information space through the phones of our children.

I don't think the Biden administration has the guts to go through with it and fight the legal battle that would follow. So I think that, you know, we're not all the way there yet. At least we can admit that we have a problem. We have a problem. We have a problem. We have a problem. We have a problem. We have a problem. We have a problem. We have a problem. We have a problem.

As much meant to a free market, I'm not into providing the weapon to slit our own throats. And Josh Rogan's referring to that from The Washington Post when he said he's not going to ban TikTok because he's afraid of losing voters. And they talked about the free market and there's 20 million people or they made an average of these influencers on TikTok. And that's a big part of the way we're going to go. So let's bring in Kevin O'Leary, chairman of the O'Leary of O'Leary Ventures, one of the stores, the Shark Tank. Kevin, great to have you back.

Thank you very much. Hey, just on your thought, I know you're a free market guy. How do you feel about aligning our enemies, naming them and not allowing them to have free rein at our market like China has when it comes to TikTok? That's the best way to deal with China going forward. And I've been in this camp for about 11 years now because I have a lot of issues doing business with them.

And I'm living the real life in terms of getting ripped off my IP. Any time I get a product that I'm manufacturing their past five million in sales here stateside, they knock it off and I can't litigate them in their courts. So I just read what they understand. I don't want to sound too hawkish, but this is a pragmatic way to deal with it.

There's no negotiating with them. They only understand the stick. And we're a bigger stick right now because our economy is bigger and they need us actually more than we need them. Apple was over there yesterday. There's tens of thousands of jobs a year we create manufacturing jobs for Apple just to manufacture iPhones.

We also market there. But this idea of reciprocosity, in other words, make it equal football game for both sides. And I'll give you an example. If I can't sue you for stealing my stuff and manufacturing it selling to the domestic market in China, which I can't, no problem. You can't litigate in our courts here either. Just the same. Same football game, level playing field. If I can't figure out a way to stop you from stealing my IP and we rip you off here, okay, no problem.

Fair game, equal playing field. Now, TikTok, you don't let me put Google. I can't put Twitter there. You shut down Facebook a long time ago. You don't let our tech companies into your domestic market. You knock them off and you create equivalents and grow those.

No problem. If you're Chinese, you've got to be shut down here. So what we have to do, to be fair, is to make them sell TikTok so that it's on American servers.

And this is not about being vindictive. It's if you let us put Google there and let our companies compete, you can compete here too. By the way, if you want to raise money on our markets because we can't do it on yours, got to delist your stocks off the New York Stock Exchange. You know, that's the only way to deal with these guys. They're not – and I have all the respect in the world for the people of China, but it's the policies that are now tipped in their favor, and it's time to fight back. So I've become extremely hawkish on what to do with China. I really want to fight back. I want to do everything they're doing to us and their country. I want to do the exact same thing to them here. But I want to tell them about it.

I would say, look, you get six months to clean your act up on accounting with your listed Chinese companies, or, like our companies, you're going to get delisted. You've got to play by the rules. That's the deal with China. And believe me, they'll respect that. They respect the stick. They understand the stick. They want the stick. Let's give them the stick.

I hear you. And I just don't know why people are reluctant to do it. I think Trump started to do it. I think we're getting in that place. But now they're competing with us in Central America, in South America, in Africa, trying to take over the Middle East.

We know that they're trying to combine now with Iran and Russia. I think we have to, as a country, if you want to lead this nation, we have to go acknowledge that, and then it won't be so hard to get kids off TikTok. But the president's obviously not a fan of that school of thought, because he just did a big thing on St. Patrick's Day with this big TikTok influencer. So obviously he doesn't take it that serious, Kevin. It's about policy.

You don't even have to get into politics. You can say, whoever's in the White House, you have to show the stick. You should invite the Chinese over and show them a golden stick and say, this stick goes either way.

It's the stick of friendship or it's the stick of competition, whichever you wish. Now, if you don't clean your act up in your country and you don't let us compete and you keep whacking us with all your IP theft and we can't protect our IP over there, we're going to do the same to you. I really like that idea because somebody in there is going to get the joke, and right now we're still a bigger economy.

We have to apply the stick now. Absolutely, and they need our market. So I'm talking, obviously, with Kevin O'Leary. Kevin, this is what Neel Kashkari said about the state of our banking system. You know he is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Cut 31. The banking system is resilient and it's sound. The banking system has a strong capital position and a lot of liquidity and has the full support of the Federal Reserve and other regulators standing behind it. Now, I'm not saying that all of the stresses are behind us. I expect this process will take some time, but fundamentally the banking system is sound. Do you agree?

Not quite. This provision that the Fed has put in place, this special loan provision, is for one year. There's some confusion about whether we're guaranteeing every deposit or not for full amounts beyond $250,000.

That's not resolved. The bigger issue that I think we should all get our heads around, and we want a very vibrant banking system. There's 11 sectors in the S&P economy and banking is one of them, financial services, but it's the only sector that services all other 10 as well. So you got to have basic good banking.

Now, here's the issue. We've got thousands of tiny regional banks and when they were set up, up to 100 years ago, it made total sense to do that because the emerging economy of our country at that time was different in every geography. What was going on in California was different than what was going on in New York, different than Florida, different than the Midwest. So the lenders had to accommodate the uniqueness of each of those geographies' economy. That is not the case today because we have, in the last 20 years, digitized all banking. In other words, 99% of transactions, even in regional banks, are online. That's very efficient, but it also makes the use and need for regional banks a little redundant. And so what happens when you have a bank like Silicon Valley Bank or First Republic or Signature Bank, these are the most recent failures. It's not because the banking system is broken. It's because the people running those banks were idiots. I hate to say it that way, but it's true.

So our system works very efficiently. When you get an idiot doing something, he goes bankrupt and someone else buys it, which is what has occurred today. And that's okay, but the bigger problem long-term is why do we need so many little regional banks?

And here's the big, big issue that I think is going to become the narrative for the next six months. Okay, I'm a farmer in Florida, all right? I pay my taxes. I work in the Agrarian Society of Florida. I grow food for the rest of the country.

Maybe it's oranges or whatever it is. Then you tell me that there's a banker in California who lends money to highly speculative startups and technology. He blows himself up and I have to pay for it? I don't think so.

I don't want to do that. I'm going to worry about what I'm doing here in Florida. So what we need to do is to figure out how to put the state into this equation, because if you want to run your state with bad policy like in Massachusetts or in New Jersey or in New York or California, where the regulatory environment is so brutal and so hard to maneuver that business can't really function there, well then why shouldn't they eat their own state banks? Why aren't they responsible for them? And I think that's where we're going to go, because you've got a shining example of this in the state of North Dakota, the only state with its own sovereign bank. They don't have failures in North Dakota because the Bank of North Dakota doesn't compete with the regional banks there. It supports them. When there's trouble, it helps one of them out. They take care of their own and they bank on the assets of their incredible economy, which is based on energy and agrarian, you know, a lot of food and grain grown there.

But those guys get the joke. We should look at North Dakota, say let's get every other state their own sovereign bank and let them eat their own cooking. When they screw up, they eat it. And all of a sudden you've got a big daddy bank looking over the small guys, making sure they don't screw up. That's what we need.

Well, that's very interesting, Kevin O'Leary, our guest. Kevin, how do you feel about First Citizens Bank buying SBB? Well, what you should care about is the taxpayer 8 to 20 billion of that deal. So, you know, it wasn't a perfect buyout by any means.

The crappy assets they didn't buy. And so the way to look at it, the FDIC insurance, every politician will tell you, oh, that's not the taxpayer. That's a load of crapola.

Here's why. The banks themselves pay into that fund. The way they get the money to pay into that fund is they charge you banking fees. So it's a burden on the banking system.

It has about $120 billion in it. On this transaction alone, 16% of that insurance was used up when the FDIC ate $20 billion worth of garbage on that balance sheet. So you, as a taxpayer, paid for that. Never let a politician tell you it doesn't cost the taxpayer a dime.

That is such BS. It always costs the taxpayer all of the time every day. That's what government is. It's funded by the people, by the people. And it's fees one way or another. This is something I pound the table on all the time. So do I want to pay another $20 billion for the next idiot bank?

No, thank you. How about it just goes to zero because they were idiots and people that put their money with idiot bankers have to pay a price for that. That way you start to get a little more creative and start thinking about, wait a second, why don't I diversify where I'm holding my cash into maybe three or four or five banks because I'm not sure where the black swan idiot banker is.

And you never will be. Well, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank ends up being on the San Francisco Fed that was warned in 2019 and 2021 about their balance sheet and about the increasing rates and how they were out of sorts. And he did nothing. And that guy better not have gotten paid off nor the whole board, one of which had banking experience, which is outrageous. I got to ask you, you did mention about different states. Kevin O'Leary will not do, doesn't think it's a good idea to do business in places like New York and California.

Why is it so formidable? So I think it's fair to have competition between states. Now think about it this way. Since 1954, when they started taking statistics on venture capital, money that starts great American companies, that is 64% of our economy still is. So you care about funding startups. Now, 95%, 94% of that since 1954 went to two states, Massachusetts around the MIT and Harvard hub and Silicon Valley in California, the birthplace of a lot of interesting technology from the transistor on board.

And so that's where you'd naturally put it. Today, I would never invest a dime in either of those states. California is not in business. The regulatory environment is absolutely chaos, and the taxes are just prohibitive and uncompetitive. The same can be said for Massachusetts, but it's worse there. There's a place where if you're successful as an individual, you're punished by Elizabeth Warren's super tax.

Shame on you for being a great American entrepreneur. You have to be taxed. That is ridiculous to pay a super tax. That is fundamentally against what made this country great in the first place.

I so think that is a huge problem that I don't want to reward it by putting a dime into that place. Now, I respect her as a politician. She's very successful.

I do not agree with her policy. And luckily, we have competition. So why don't I just take that company and move it to Kentucky, Tennessee, North Dakota, South Dakota, somewhere where the taxes are competitive and the regulatory environment is pro-business. And the reason I can do that today that I never could just three years ago is in a post-pandemic economy, 40% of my staff work outside of the headquarters.

So I can put an HQ anywhere I want and that's exactly what I'm doing. That's the whole idea. Punish bad policy with your money. Starve these states out of these policies because that's exactly what's happening. You look at what's going on in Florida with real estate values, billions of dollars, $5 billion a year transferring out of these East Coast highly taxed states down to the Florida economy to Texas. This competition among states is a real narrative now. Let me give you one other example that nails it on the head. It's not about just one year of policy or one politician or one senator or one governor.

This tells the story. In the state of Minnesota, there's a town called Moorhead. 200 yards across the river is Fargo, North Dakota. 50 years ago, each one of those towns had 48,000 people living in them. Okay? Exactly the same. Fast forward to today.

Fargo has 261,000 people, Microsoft's second largest campus, a booming arts scene, manufacturing facilities, largest manufacturer in the states for vaccines, biotech, pharma, all of that booming. Across the river, 200 yards, 30,000 feet. You drive over in a car, it looks like you're stepping into Cuba. It's a wasteland.

That's the difference between a punitive tax policy of Minnesota, the estate tax in Minnesota, the unstable regulatory environment. Great example. Last question. What's with Sam Bankman-Fried, Kevin? Have you gotten any of your money back?

Have you gotten any answers? No one does. And that whole narrative on FTX has turned to recovery. The story is interesting. We've got $4 billion found in Nassau where the government is holding onto it because they say the alleged fraud occurred on the islands.

Obviously, we've also got FTXUS where they found over a billion dollars as well. The bankruptcy court's starting to last through all these moving parts. We don't know what's going to happen.

It's going to take a lot of years. Kevin O'Leary, always great. Thanks so much, Kevin. Best of luck. New from the Fox News Podcast Network.

I'm Dana Perrino. Join me for season three of my limited-time podcast, Everything Will Be Okay, based on my bestselling book of the same name. Make sure you subscribe to this series wherever you download podcasts and leave a rating and review. Listen to this show ad-free on Fox News Podcast Plus, on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your Prime membership, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.