A funeral bill is a funny way to start talking about college. When Guy Fieri spoke to Fox News Digital in December 2023, he remembered his father telling him that he planned to die broke and that Guy could expect to pay for the funeral. That was his father’s line, as Guy told it. Then he got to the part he’d passed down to his own sons. If they wanted what he’d spent years building, he expected them to come prepared to earn it.
What Fieri said in December 2023
In the December 13 interview, Fieri put a concrete condition on that expectation. He talked about two degrees and explained that he meant an education that continued through graduate school. There’s no figure for a family fortune in that exchange and no document setting out who gets what. What you can hear him describe is the work he expects his sons to do if they want a chance at the businesses he built.
Where his father’s advice came in
Fieri’s father had already steered him toward an education of his own. Guy told the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that he was at a junior college in Sacramento when his dad called to tell him about UNLV. Fieri saw a school that taught hospitality in a city where the industry was all around him. He graduated in 1990. Years later he returned to talk with students and advise the hospitality college, the same school that Hunter would eventually attend.
The business question came back at the Super Bowl
In February 2024, Entertainment Tonight asked him about the December remarks at Super Bowl LVIII. Hunter, Ryder and their cousin Jules were all there. Fieri talked about the three being able to run the businesses in the future and told the interviewer he expected further schooling. Hunter had a more immediate question about that plan. He doubted his dad would ever retire. The exchange was about a possible handover, with the man who would have to step aside sitting right there.
Two degrees, as Guy explained it
It’s easy to get tangled up in the shorthand. Fieri used the phrase two degrees and also said he was thinking about postgraduate education. His examples made that clearer. He talked about a master’s program for Hunter and law school for Jules. Those are different routes. He didn’t give an interviewer a list of acceptable degrees or name a date by which anybody had to finish. If you hear a precise formula in the retelling, the interviews themselves are looser than that.
Why Shaquille O’Neal came up
Fieri gave Shaquille O’Neal credit for the idea. The way Fieri tells it, Shaq had put the choice to his own kids in terms of two degrees if they wanted access to what he’d earned. That’s Fieri describing where he got the line, and in his own family he tied the idea to running the businesses. The photo of O’Neal belongs with that part of the story. It’s an archival portrait, separate from the two Fieri interviews.
Hunter finished his MBA
Hunter graduated from UNLV’s hospitality college in 2019. When his father brought up the University of Miami in the 2023 interview, the graduate degree was still in progress. By May 2025 the story had moved on. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Guy said Hunter had just completed his MBA at Miami. He was able to give an update on a particular degree at a particular school. There was no announcement in that conversation that Hunter had taken over.
The engagement photo is from an earlier chapter
The image of Hunter with Tara Bernstein is from a Nylon event. When the old story was written, their November 2023 engagement was fresh news. They’d met at the Super Bowl earlier that year, and Hunter proposed at the Fieri family ranch in California. They returned to the ranch for their wedding in August 2025. That public milestone dates the archive without turning a photograph from an earlier event into a wedding picture.
Ryder went from high school to San Diego State
Guy remembered Ryder pushing back when the subject came up in 2023. As Guy recounted it, his younger son wanted to get through college before anyone started talking about a graduate degree. Ryder was still in high school then. In the May 2025 podcast, Guy described him as a freshman at San Diego State. That gives us a dated college milestone. It leaves Ryder’s later plans and the question of who might run a family business open.
Jules was pursuing a different kind of work
Guy and Lori raised Jules, Guy’s nephew, after Guy’s sister died. In 2023 Guy talked about Jules studying law at Loyola Marymount and wanting a career in entertainment. In the May 2025 podcast, he said Jules was about to graduate and was already working as an agent in electronic dance music. That update is useful because law school made sense in the work Jules was pursuing. The interview doesn’t show Jules taking up a position running one of Guy’s restaurants.
There was already work outside the classroom
Guy also described Hunter’s work in the original interview. He said Hunter had his own Food Network contract and sold wine for the family label, Hunt & Ryde. The name comes from Hunter and Ryder. A hospitality degree is one part of the story, and so are the hours in jobs where you have to talk to customers or work with a production crew. Those are more tangible signs of what Hunter was doing at the time than any estimate of what he might one day inherit.
Where the public account ends
The two original interviews give you a father explaining what he asks of his sons and nephew. The later one supplies a little of what happened after that, including Hunter finishing school and Jules approaching graduation in a different field. If there’s ever a formal change in who runs the businesses, it will be a separate event with its own date and terms. For now, the graduation is the part of Hunter’s story his dad was able to put a date on.
