Lately, it seems that you can’t turn on CBUT or Newsworld without seeing a promo for “The Lang & O’Leary Exchange” or for “Dragons’
Den,” in which O’Leary co-stars with fellow entrepreneurs Arlene Dickinson, Robert Herjavec, Jim Treliving and W. Brett Wilson.
“Dragons’ Den” has been on hiatus through the Olympics — CBC prefers to not air one of its most popular shows against impossible competition — and it returns to the main network March 3.
Meanwhile, O’Leary can be seen daily on the CBC News Network, co-hosting the afternoon business show “The Lang & O’Leary Exchange,”
in which his views often make financial reporter Amanda Lang look like a Bolshevik. Plus, he launched a U.S. TV career last year as one of the panelists on “Shark Tank,” ABC’s version of “Dragons’ Den.”
And he’s also involved as an investor and co-host of the Discovery Channel’s series “Project Earth,” in which scientists look for ways to slow global warming. Yet he recently told the Boston Globe that TV is a “hobby.”
“I spend most of my day as chairman of O’Leary Funds,” he explains now. “We’re global investors. ... That’s the science of my life. It’s very disciplined. I get up very early in the morning. I look at our results every day, work on the mandate, new products, new funds.
“Television is the art. It’s the yin and the yang. The chaos of TV counterbalances the discipline of investing.”
As for O’Leary’s politics, he describes himself as an “anarchocapitalist.” That is, he doesn’t think government should be allowed to do much more than build roads and wage war.
He has described the U.S. economy as “dead” and says Canada has to move away from U.S. exports because “that country will never grow again.”
“I’m very frustrated with government now,” he says. “And a lot of what I see today is criminal or bordering on insane, or both. When I see investments in Chrysler on behalf of the public, that is insanity. And I work as hard as I can in the media to fi ght that kind of madness.
The worst you can do as a government is to endorse mediocrity like that.”
One of O’Leary’s earliest ventures was in TV production, and he says he likes keeping his hand in the field — since the TV work fuels the part of his life that makes him rich.
“Television makes me a better investor,” he says. “I went to 30 countries with Discovery Channel, looking at infrastructure investing, and it made me a much better bond investor.
“So I think they go hand in hand.” O’Leary divides his time among West Palm Beach, Fla., Boston and Toronto and has investments scattered all over the world.
He credits his upbringing with giving him a “global perspective” and cites it as one reason he’s comfortable as a citizen of the world.
O’Leary’s father worked with the International Labor Organization in the 1960s and ’70s, and the family lived in France, Switzerland, Cyprus, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and Cambodia.
“It was a really interesting youth,” he says. “I met Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie when I was living in Addis Ababa. I met Cambodian Maoist Pol Pot and King Norodom Sihanouk when I was in Phnom Penh.
“I was a teenager, and I didn’t know how remarkable these experiences were. But they certainly made an impression on me later in life.”
Nowadays, O’Leary describes his politics as “hard-core capitalist.”
“The older I get, the more I go that way,” he says.
He tends to get irritated and animated when he talks about the “outrage” of government bailouts for companies such as Chrysler (but not U.S. banks) and the “idiot management” of Nortel.
The victims of such “idiot management” and government “outrage,”
however, have to fend for themselves, he says. Capitalism is self-regulating, and we just have to pick better companies to work for. “We need to be more personally responsible in this country,” he says. “There will always be Nortels. But we should never bail out failure.”
So “The Lang & O’Leary exchange” often looks like an accident that happened when a pundit from Fox News wandered onto the set and picked a fight with a CBC small-C conservative.
“I have a genuine regard for Kevin because he does believe what he’s saying,” says co-host Lang. “He’s not trying to get anybody’s goat.
He actually thinks this stuff. So I can forgive him for it.”