Universities got decimated by the power of social media: Kevin O'Leary

Joining us now, O’Leary Ventures Chairman, Kevin O’Leary. It’s always great to have you with us, Kevin, to get your perspective on what’s going on in the world. And when it comes to what we’ve seen on campuses, we’re talking a lot about the president, specifically the President of Columbia University. I’m wondering if this is a kind of situation. We look at it like a business or a company. If you’re the CEO of a company, the buck stops with you. But at universities, these presidents aren’t really taking as much responsibility. In a way it seems to be the cultures permeated almost from the bottom up if you will, rather than the top down and it’s it’s just like a little more complicated. I’m wondering how you look at this and and how we could start to as a country and communities specifically start to rehab some of the damage that’s been done here. Well, I think that’s a really interesting analogy. You’ve brought forward running like a business in, in a way a university is a business because it looks for income from student fees from the government certainly and of course from donors, it’s faculty and students as they’ve become successful, they come back and give to the endowment. But what universities never saw coming, and I’m quite intrigued with this because I’ll be teaching this topic at Harvard this fall, is social media. The management of of universities almost everywhere have been decimated by the power of social media. It’s out of their control. And so the minute something happens, it’s controversial, it gets amplified a million X on social, including the student base and students in every other university. And this is a new phenomenon that was not around in the protests that occurred around the Vietnam War, for example, in the 60s or the war in Afghanistan. Social media back then didn’t exist. And certainly the news footage was selected and curated by the networks that then put it on TV at night. And there was only three of them at that time. Today, everybody is their own network. It’s all 4K resolution and the message gets out in seconds, totally beyond the control of university board or president or Dean or anybody else. And they’ve all got to learn how to deal with this. Yeah, Kevin, the CEO of the HIMS and hers company, they’re a personal care company, came out initially and said I support these protesters and what they’re doing. There’s a place for you. We’ll hire you at our company. He had to kind of dial that back after the company got a lot of pushback and the stock price went down. You’re going to be teaching students at Harvard. Just found that out. Are you going to be telling them, hey, if you want to do this kind of stuff, be prepared. It’s going to follow you the rest of your career, and it could hurt you. You know, let me preface my comments about this situation by saying that I’m, I don’t support war and I don’t support. I don’t get behind either side. I’m against war and and I’m I’m AI, support entrepreneurship in America. That’s what I focus on. However, if I were a majority shareholder in a controlled position of equity or debt in that company, I would have fired this individual seconds after he made those remarks. Be gone because who are you serving by saying that you know you’re in a highly polarized situation, 50% of your market does not agree with your view. We know that’s the case. People are very polarized by this war, as they are in every war. So who are you serving by saying something like that? You’re not serving your employees. You’re not serving your customers. You’re not serving your shareholders. You’re serving yourself. And for that I call you an idiot and I whack you. You have no right to push your values on everybody else. You can have an opinion just like I can or anybody else can. But it is not your business to polarize everybody on your stack of shareholders and customers and employees. That has that mistake has already been made. We saw it first happened as Heiser Busch. Look what happened there set $6 billion worth market cap. If you can’t figure this out as ACEO, your board should fire you right now. And if you were working for me, you’d be whacked in seconds, seconds you’d be history. I want to switch gears a little bit. Biden’s talking about another additional student debt bailout. Economist says, you know, we’re already talking about how highly inflationary this is. Bill Maher had an interesting take on it over the weekend. Take a listen, Biden administration’s student debt cancellation will cost to combine 870 billion to 1.4 trillion. That’s a lot of debt forgiveness. OK, so colleges constantly raise tuition, then the kids take out more loans, then the government comes by and pays those loans. OK, so my tax dollars are supporting this Jew hating. No, you. I don’t think so. Your reaction? I’m already on the record on this and I’m against this. I’m against all of these loan forgiveness because it’s unfair. It’s unamerican. What happens if you did not go to college because you couldn’t afford it 5 cohorts ago? Or what about the cohorts in the future? They’re not going to get off this easy. No one be able to afford it. This is completely unamerican. It’s totally unfair. Say you fought in a war and you were a veteran and you’re starting from scratch coming back home and you have to take on debt as a student. You’re not forgiven because you missed this freebie coupon opportunity. This is completely unfair. That’s why it shouldn’t happen. Biden or any president, it’s not about the presidency. It’s about the fact that in all the cohorts over generations in America have been taught you’ve got to pay your debts, right? That’s how we operate this economy, right? This is totally unfair and unamerican. If you start to breakdown even 1 aspect of it, for example this aspect, then everything else starts to deteriorate. Kevin, always great to have you. Thank you for being here. Take care.