April 3, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:03:13
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Here's the problem, you know, is that it's not so much sales, but brainwashing that was going on. | ||
| And when you're brainwashing people or trying to create a certain culture or a thought culture, right? | ||
| There's these two sides to it. | ||
| It's number one, the constant reinforcement of one message. | ||
| It's a constant reinforcement, but barring a message. | ||
| Danger, danger, you know, death, death, death. | ||
| You stay home, say, you know, stop. | ||
| Every world is changing. | ||
| But there's another side to it, too. | ||
| You have to squash all other competing messages. | ||
| And that's where the platforms came in and they literally stopped free speech and they made it so you could only hear one message. | ||
| that brainwash people. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, people, our first live in studio, in house, what do we call this, shoot? | ||
| With the original Wolf of Wall Street, George Belfort. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| My friend who also fled Los Angeles. | ||
| And we are here living the life in Miami, Florida. | ||
| You look like Miami, except you got the black shirt, so that's a little L.A. | ||
| But the tan, you look like a million bucks. | ||
| You just told me you're 59 years old. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Can I tell you something? | ||
|
unidentified
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What's going on here? | |
| But it's an interesting type of fleeing, you know? | ||
| We come from Long Island. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And they fled from, like, the Bronx out to Long Island. | ||
| This is like fleeing back from the... It's a cross-country fleeing, you know? | ||
| Fleeing, I don't know what. | ||
| It's a combination of taxes, bad government. | ||
| Crime due to prosecutors not, you know, arresting for petty thefts. | ||
| Like, I don't know, you're in New York, right? | ||
| I remember when it was so bad when I grew up that you went to Times Square, you would just never come home. | ||
| You were gonna get a good chance you were getting killed, right? | ||
| Drugs and sex shops, that's it. | ||
| It was a time when they made death wishes. | ||
| And then some guy named Rudy Giuliani came in. | ||
| You could hate him or love the guy, but what he did was he just had this zero-tolerance policy on lifestyle crimes. | ||
| Squeegee people arrested. | ||
| Any petty guy arrested. | ||
| And you know what happened? | ||
| It trickled up. | ||
| Murder rate plummeted. | ||
| Violent crime plummeted. | ||
| It was really interesting. | ||
| Police presence soared. | ||
| So, gee, what a shock. | ||
| Defund the police and look what happens. | ||
| And now they're literally doing the reverse, where the petty crimes are the ones they're letting you off on. | ||
| Jump the turnstile, you're good to go. | ||
| Steal some stuff out of CVS, you're good to go. | ||
| That's the root of... I saw it. | ||
| I'll never forget it. | ||
| It was like, oh, that's so terrible. | ||
| He's addressing the squeegee. | ||
| And you watched it just cleaned up, miraculously cleaned up the city. | ||
| It was amazing, you know? | ||
| So, when I called you, I think, like, second week in December, or I texted you just to say, hey, I moved to Miami, And then you respond a minute later, you're like, I moved to Miami. | ||
| I had no idea you were moving. | ||
| You didn't know I was moving. | ||
| I got out real quick. | ||
| I was just like, I got to get out of here. | ||
| How long did it take you to figure out that Cali just wasn't working or LA wasn't working? | ||
| We had talked about a little bit about a year ago, but where you lived, I was a little more off the beaten path in the valley. | ||
| You lived in a super nice area in the hills, but sort of right below that, a friend of mine, Who owns a huge car, Fashion Nova. | ||
| Rich Fashion Nova. | ||
| This is maybe a quarter mile from me. | ||
| He got followed home in the hills there, and there was a shootout. | ||
| They shot his bodyguard. | ||
| His bodyguard killed one of the people. | ||
| I mean like, and this has happened like once, I don't know, I don't want to exaggerate, but it's happening frequently enough. | ||
| Oh yeah, I was hearing gunshots in Encino. | ||
| That it's just like, you know, you just can't wear a watch. | ||
| I mean, it's like, you know, my wife's from Argentina. | ||
| She's like, when you go to Buenos Aires, don't wear a watch. | ||
| It's like, oh yeah, LA too now. | ||
| Was that it for you? | ||
| I mean, were there a couple things? | ||
| Like the taxes, obviously. | ||
| You're a money guy. | ||
| We'll talk about some of that kind of stuff. | ||
| You love success. | ||
| That's your whole thing. | ||
| You love that more than anybody. | ||
| Was that driving you nuts or were you willing to... Everyone in LA is willing to do it for a while. | ||
| I was for a while. | ||
| I don't mind paying taxes, but I do mind if they're not using the money wisely. | ||
| If they're wasting the money, that kind of bothers me. | ||
| If they're using it for things I don't agree with. | ||
| But just, to me, it was a combination of, number one, when Trump changed the law that didn't allow you to write off your state taxes against your federal. | ||
| That was a big hit for someone like myself and a lot of people. | ||
| That was one thing. | ||
| I didn't agree with that, but hey, you know, whatever. | ||
| Can't agree with everyone. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Policies, right? | ||
| But it was a combination of the taxes, the lifestyle, and also the politics. | ||
| Like, you know, listen, you know, I'm like probably my very much conservative fiscally, | ||
| socially liberal as you can get. | ||
| That's me basically in a nutshell. | ||
| But I felt like that it was almost this weird virtue signaling, how low can you go on the | ||
| virtue signaling, signaling continuum. | ||
| And just like, it's uncomfortable. | ||
| I don't want to live amongst that stuff. | ||
| And then when COVID hit, it was like, I came down the floor and it was like, free at last, free at last. | ||
| Were you shocked? | ||
| Like, every day that I've been here, I'm like, man, I can't believe it. | ||
| I feel like I'm waking up in a dream every day. | ||
| I'm going to tell you, I got in some trouble on Instagram and YouTube. | ||
| I got my stuff taken down for saying that lockdowns don't work. | ||
| But they proved it. | ||
| What are you, anti-science? | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| But it's like ridiculous. | ||
| I was saying, this is my opinion. | ||
| I'm like, I think that you're locking down the wrong people. | ||
| I think we should lock down older people who really would get affected and let the people who are healthy go out and work. | ||
| all the money they were going to save, you can take the opium, give them caviar, flame | ||
| the owner champagne, the rest of their lives, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Take care of the older people, but protect them instead of just locking everyone down, | ||
| causing economic chaos and it didn't work anyway. | ||
| The greatest thing, honestly, was Omicron, the last one, because it was so infectious | ||
| that everyone just got it, so it was natural herd immunity. | ||
| And that was really, I think, what ended this pandemic more than anything else was the Omicron was so contagious. | ||
| I was in Punta del Este, Uruguay, for New Year's. | ||
| I think the whole, everybody in the whole island, the whole area, it was just, that's how contagious it was. | ||
| And, you know, but people weren't really dying from it. | ||
| And it was, I think, you know, at least I think the best end you could have had, hopefully, you know, it's the end, but to what was just, to me, almost like, How do I say this? | ||
| It was almost like a Casca-esque series of actions by world governments to do, I'm not sure even what they were trying to do. | ||
| But do you think it's over? | ||
| Like, to me, act two is coming. | ||
| Oh, Fauci's just dying. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's like, just can't wait, Fauci's praying that. | |
| You know, like, listen, I think that you never know. | ||
| The difference with COVID, and in the beginning, listen, it could have been the Spanish flu. | ||
| But it wasn't. | ||
| And I don't know why they couldn't accept that. | ||
| It wasn't the Spanish flu. | ||
| The Spanish flu was a very different thing when people would literally, you or I, in the prime, just drop dead. | ||
| It was very different. | ||
| This was something that was in a different level, but it was almost like there was this weird, global... | ||
| I don't know if it's a conspiracy. | ||
| It's almost like the madness is contagious. | ||
| Almost like this mass delusion that was happening. | ||
| And I still don't know why. | ||
| I mean, I really don't understand it, because it never made sense to me. | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| OK, I get it. | ||
| It's a real virus. | ||
| People are getting sick, right? | ||
| Some people are very, very susceptible. | ||
| But like, when you looked at it logically, it just wasn't making any sense. | ||
| Like, everyone's being locked down in there. | ||
| I don't know, the counter on the screen. | ||
| I mean, like, what the fuck? | ||
| I mean, like, you know? | ||
| You don't strike me as the type that would lockdown very well. | ||
| You need people, right? | ||
| You really need people. | ||
| My wife was ready to kill me. | ||
| She's a law-abiding citizen. | ||
| She's listening to the news. | ||
| Her English wasn't perfect back in the day. | ||
| So she's like, oh, death, death, death, lockdown, lockdown, right? | ||
| And I'm like, people are coming over, hugging them. | ||
| She's like, what are you doing? | ||
| I'm like, listen, you're going to kill me from disinfecting. | ||
| She's disinfecting the food. | ||
| Spraying the freaking things with ammonia. | ||
| I'm going to dive ammonia poisoning, okay? | ||
| Not from COVID, right? | ||
| So she was really careful and I was just not. | ||
| I literally went out and I said, you know what? | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| I'd rather just get it. | ||
| I wanted to get it because I wanted to become immune to it. | ||
| And that's what happened, by the way, is I got it and I was sick for a couple of days and I have a very strong immune system and I got sick. | ||
| I have nothing that would ever give me Not that I want to give these freaks any ideas, but when they bring COVID back, I just know they're bringing it back, did they screw up something in the sales job? | ||
| So it was like, hey, you know, let me get it. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| I was sick for a couple of days, nothing bad. | ||
| And I got it a second time. | ||
| I only tested positive and no symptoms. | ||
| And since then I've literally walked into like COVID wards and I can't catch it anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, so I mean, not that I want to give these freaks any ideas, but when they bring | ||
| COVID back, I just know they're bringing it back. | ||
| Did they screw up something in the sales job? | ||
| Because after the two weeks to flatten the curve thing, I kind of realized it was all | ||
| I knew the old world wasn't coming back. | ||
| I didn't believe them. | ||
| I didn't believe the body language, the messaging, the commercials, everything based on fear. | ||
| I mean, should they have done something different, Sal? | ||
| What should we watch out for, I guess, is what I'm asking. | ||
| It's not so much sales, but brainwashing that was going on. | ||
| And when you're brainwashing people or trying to create a certain culture or a thought culture, right? | ||
| There's these two sides to it. | ||
| It's number one, the constant reinforcement of one message. | ||
| It's a constant reinforcement, but barring a message. | ||
| Danger, danger, you know, death, death, death. | ||
| You stay home, say, you know, stop, every world is changing. | ||
| But there's another side to it too. | ||
| You have to squash all other competing messages. | ||
| And that's where the platforms came in. | ||
| And they literally stopped free speech, and they made it so you could only hear one message. | ||
| That brainwashed people. | ||
| But even that, I think, there was many people, like, almost had no choice. | ||
| I mean, like, the society just literally, you know, they virtue-signaled us to, like, the irrational people to death. | ||
| But, like, it was like, you were, like, You actually believe this shit? | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| Am I going to believe my eyes or the nonsense I'm hearing in the present? | ||
| By the way, it's still going on right now with other things. | ||
| It just shocks me, the lack of legitimacy. | ||
| On TV, with the news. | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| What do we do about it? | ||
| I mean, that's literally what my show is. | ||
| It's filmed in Ukraine. | ||
| I think what Putin did was terrible, but there's more than one side to the story, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's awful. | ||
| It doesn't mean that he shouldn't be thought of as a bad guy for invading a country, but it's just like, I don't know. | ||
| Oh, so you're a Putin apologist. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, I'm a Putin apologist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah! | |
| Yeah, you said something with nuance. What are you nuts? | ||
| But I saw a really interesting interview with on talker and I knew that before | ||
| Like I've been sick taking this all along and I didn't say it this time. You know why because it is a very difficult | ||
| type rope to walk Because it's not my responsibility. It's not | ||
| I'm not that guy. | ||
| That's not who I am. | ||
| I'm not here to bring the news to the world. | ||
| But if I was, I certainly would speak my mind more. | ||
| But people are dying. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| It's fucking awful what's going on there, right? | ||
| But that being said, it is not black and white. | ||
| And this guy Zelensky is no freaking... He's no stellar person that represents democracy. | ||
| He just banned 11 political parties. | ||
| Lefty political parties. | ||
| Why? | ||
| In the name of democracy. | ||
| Why isn't the news talking about this? | ||
| I think because they want to do it here, too, and they're just running the test game. | ||
| I mean, I know that all sounds nuts, but... Well, that's a good one. | ||
| Is there anything that I could say or anything that you would hear that you'd be like, nah, that can't be right? | ||
| Like, everything is so out of whack right now. | ||
| That it's like you'd believe anything. | ||
| This is pretty obvious. | ||
| This is the military-industrial complex doing what they do best. | ||
| War, weapons, destruction. | ||
| Like, this guy Zelensky is saying we're on the verge of World War III over Ukraine? | ||
| Yeah, why? | ||
| It's not even a strategic point for us. | ||
| Why is Ukraine? | ||
| What about what's going on in Syria or Yemen? | ||
| All these other slaughters around the world. | ||
| All we did to Iraq or Afghanistan. | ||
| Why is this suddenly? | ||
| Why are we supposed to go to war and start World War III over Ukraine? | ||
| As bad as I think what's happening in Ukraine, I'm not saying it's not terrible. | ||
| And I'm sympathetic to the people. | ||
| And I've been to Ukraine many times. | ||
| Amazing people. | ||
| You know, I'm not interested in starting World War III over this. | ||
| What do you make of how they change the messaging so quickly? | ||
| So like the State of the Union, it's like Biden does a half hour on Ukraine to start. | ||
| As he's standing there with no masks, Pelosi behind him, she's 900, he's 800. | ||
| And that the average American is not walking around thinking about Ukraine that often. | ||
| And again, that's not diminishing what's going on there and you can't just invade a sovereign nation. | ||
| But like, how do they, the messaging of how they flip it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They flip it so quickly and get everybody's eye on something else. | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| It's really shocking. | ||
| And I think that the most shocking part is it's probably always like this. | ||
| It's just that we live in a world now where it's very hard to not have things be transparent. | ||
| Manipulation was always there. | ||
| We always all long for the days of Walter Crockett. | ||
| He was probably just as bad. | ||
| You know, it's like, so I just think that right now it's like really hard to hide anything. | ||
| So you have these sort of, you know, more discerning minds that are just saying bullshit. | ||
| They call bullshit. | ||
| And I think those minds were out there before, but they had nowhere to call bullshit. | ||
| So you have social media about the platforms where people could have voices. | ||
| So the dissenting at least gets out there somewhat before it's squashed. | ||
| It's so funny, because we've done each other's shows a bunch of times before, and whenever I've had you go over for dinner or whatever, it's like, we can do the politics thing, and it's funny to me that you sort of talk about politics, but you could, if you never talked about politics again, you'd be fine, right? | ||
| I don't really, I don't, listen, I'm very much into politics, but it's not where I, you know, my heartbeat is not in politics. | ||
| It intrigues me in the sense that, you know, it's the most corrupt, um, shockingly corrupt, you know, institution, and What's happened is that the press and the attack squads have created a paradigm where no one really has anything good going and want to run for office. | ||
| Trump, I couldn't believe he did it. | ||
| Maybe he didn't realize what he was getting himself into, but why would you run for office? | ||
| It's just the most evil thing. | ||
| It's like they dig up any dirt that you have. | ||
| It's all about undermining you, tripping you up, discrediting you. | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| It's almost like the Gestapo is on both sides just trying to destroy, destroy propaganda. | ||
| And it's not about truth and it's not about making the country a better place. | ||
| I really think that the U.S. | ||
| has seen its better days and ain't coming back. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| So do you see any way out of this? | ||
| To me, I see that there'll be pockets out. | ||
| Where we are right now, Miami is the future, Florida is the future. | ||
| I think there's like a base there and all the people moving and they get it, why they're moving here, tech's moving here. | ||
| I think there's a bullish attitude here, but I think a lot of it is gone. | ||
| Do you think it's gone altogether or it's just going to slowly disintegrate? | ||
| Let me restate that, what I mean. | ||
| Rich people, people that, not just the rich rich, but just people that make money, they're always going to make money and they're always going to live good lives. | ||
| They're survivors. | ||
| People that are going to be really poor are always going to be dirt poor because they just have a dirt poor mentality. | ||
| They don't want to do anything to get themselves out of poverty. | ||
| But then there's all these other people that really work hard in the middle class. | ||
| Those are the ones that are getting squeezed the most. | ||
| Those people are having the American dream romp from them. | ||
| So to me, it doesn't matter to me at all. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| You're not always going to make a lot of money. | ||
| You're at that point where you make a little bit more. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| You get the life you want. | ||
| But I think what happens is it's the people in the middle that really, really suffer. | ||
| And the dollar buys less and less. | ||
| Job opportunities are becoming, you know, scarcer and scarcer. | ||
| And this woke-ism, I think, is the death of so much liberty in this country. | ||
| And it's like, I look at this, this classic me is the picture of the swimmer. | ||
| It says it all. | ||
| You look at her, she's seven feet tall, and the little girls are cowering, and people just don't stop that. | ||
| Like, the country has lost its moral compass. | ||
| She has a penis, by the way. | ||
| She does. | ||
| She has a penis. | ||
| She has a, still? | ||
| Yeah, she's still got the penis. | ||
| So the girls in the locker room are not happy because she walks around and she's got a penis. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And we're saying she, right? | ||
| Because you're trying to be respectful at some level, right? | ||
| It's like a rudder, maybe, of when she swims. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| But like something, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, you're trying to be respectful. | ||
| I know you, you are. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| So you're using the- It's not even happening! | ||
| But you're also mocking the reality of, this is a big dude who, in effect, is crushing these girls. | ||
| And the feminist- Terrible. | ||
| Here's the thing, though. | ||
| You have a daughter around that age, right? | ||
| Why don't I call her she? | ||
| If she wants to be called she, I'll call her she. | ||
| It doesn't bother me. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| If you want to be called she or a big fat galoot, I'll call you that too. | ||
| I don't care what you want to be called. | ||
| I don't care about labels like that. | ||
| So that makes her happy. | ||
|
unidentified
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That makes her happy. | |
| I guess some people will say no, she's a he and I won't refuse to do it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I'm sympathetic. | ||
| I want her to be as happy as she can or whatever you want to call her, right? | ||
| But now it's at the expense of those girls. | ||
| No, this is just nonsense. | ||
| This is fucking pure nonsense. | ||
| And if you don't know that, you're sick. | ||
| You're crazy. | ||
| If you don't know that that's patently unfair, it's beyond obvious, it's patently ridiculous, how could this be allowed? | ||
| Do you think anyone really buys it or they're just all in on the mob and they're all in on the group thing? | ||
| Anyone that buys that is fucking brain dead. | ||
| No, the brain, it's literally, it's part of something much darker and more evil. | ||
| To have that woman, or man, whatever you want to say she is, alright, competing against women that have worked their whole lives to get to this spot, and one girl didn't make the cut, that's just, it's fucked up! | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And there's no way. | ||
| It's just not fair. | ||
| I said this, by the way. | ||
| I came out and said this on TikTok a long time ago, right when it first started, I came out. | ||
| And by the way, I was genuinely supportive. | ||
| I got no hate on it. | ||
| The only hate I think I got was from people, conservative people. | ||
| Because I said, listen, I'm socially liberal. | ||
| I started saying I'm very liberal. | ||
| But I mean, this is not about that. | ||
| This is about just fairness, and this is just, it's idiotic, and I don't know why she would, or he would want, it's an empty victory. | ||
| Right, wait, so what were the conservatives getting on you for? | ||
| For like- How can you say you're socially liberal? | ||
| Oh, oh, oh, got it. | ||
| Because I am. | ||
| I mean, I don't care who's fucking who. | ||
| Why do I care? | ||
| Do I really give a shit, like, who fucks who and what the... I mean, honestly, I don't care about that stuff. | ||
| I said I'm prejudiced against two types of people. | ||
| Lazy people and stupid people. | ||
| Everyone else, I'm okay with, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to back up to say you said before about the government, because it was making me think of Wolf of Wall Street. | ||
| So the thing about the movie... I mean, the movie's so freaking brilliant. | ||
| I won't make you talk about it, because you've talked about it a bajillion times. | ||
| But, you know, you're the hero of the movie, obviously, and yet you're also doing some illegal shit, you're doing some immoral shit, or however you want to describe it. | ||
| But you hate the feds more. | ||
| You hate the people going after you more. | ||
| And they're supposed to be the good guys in this, right? | ||
| Because you're doing stuff with the penny stocks or whatever it is. | ||
| And that, I think, sort of captures what you said about the government before. | ||
| Like, they've done so much stuff now that it's sort of like The Sopranos. | ||
| You're never rooting against Tony. | ||
| He's killing people and you're still rooting for him. | ||
| Does that tell you something about how backwards everything is in an odd way? | ||
| I think that the lines of right and wrong morality have been very much blurred. | ||
| I think people just realize, for example, it's just my case specifically, like people | ||
| know that what I did was nothing compared to what they did at Goldman Sachs and Merrill | ||
| Lynch and these guys bankrupted Iceland and Greece and almost took down the entire world | ||
| economy and no one went to jail. | ||
| At least I went to jail for a couple years and did my time and I had to pay the price and I had to rebuild my life. | ||
| That was like a thousand times worse. | ||
| Doesn't mean that Ryder was right, but people also saw this sort of, you know, I think people like almost the tortured soul type. | ||
| I'm like, you're watching me walk off the edge. | ||
| Why you stop? | ||
| Like, you know, so people see there was goodness in me, there was misguidance in me, and I think people like that complexity, and you can root for someone who, I think, you feel like genuinely they're almost their own worst enemy, that I'm not killing people. | ||
| And even, by the way, with Tony, Tony, you can root for Tony, too, but, like, in this case, I'm not killing people, but you're saying, why? | ||
|
unidentified
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Why? | |
| And I think people can see themselves in a lot of the characters in that type of movie. | ||
| And that's Scorsese's brilliance, by the way. | ||
| He doesn't moralize. | ||
| He just puts characters up that are actually real and complex, and you're watching good people do bad things | ||
| and people that are terrible people do good things. | ||
| When you look back on all that, like, are you just like, even when you post pictures | ||
| a lot of times on Instagram, you'll post pictures of what you were doing back then, you know, 30 years ago, | ||
| like what you were actually doing. | ||
| Like, are you like, man, that was just freaking great. | ||
| Even though, how long were you in jail for? | ||
| 22 months. | ||
| So, all right. | ||
| That wasn't a terrible jail. | ||
| A little more than Jesse Smollett, but you know. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Jesse Smollett, oh god almighty, another character in that, right? | ||
| You know, one thing I'll say is that when I look back at what happened, the one thing I wish I did less of was the drugs. | ||
| The drugs did not enhance things. | ||
| They corrupted a lot of things and they made a lot of memories really far less enjoyable and colorful than they should have been. | ||
| For example, I've fallen asleep in the finest restaurants in the world. | ||
| I got booked for a speech next month in Monaco, right? | ||
| And they got a beautiful suite at the Hotel de Paris, right? | ||
| And I'm like, oh yeah, I fell asleep at the Louis XIV restaurant in a bowl of soup. | ||
| It was a $12,000 dinner, I can't remember it, but I remember it was 12 grand and I felt my wife had to pick my head up out of the frickin' soup, right? | ||
| That was like the story of my life. | ||
| So that aspect, I look back and say, I wish I could have done things differently with the drugs. | ||
| But other than that, when I look at it, I wouldn't change anything because it was what got me to this point in my life. | ||
| Obviously, I made some mistakes. | ||
| I had a lot of fun, did a lot of things right as well. | ||
| But I think looking back at your life and trying to say, I shouldn't have done that. | ||
| I don't think that's healthy. | ||
| kept you going like that, you're not broken now, like you're so thriving. | ||
| It's every time I'm around you and everyone knows it, like you're infectious with your energy, | ||
| this is exactly who you are off camera. | ||
| Like you just freaking love life. | ||
| Did you ever get to a point where you were like starting to break or anything like that? | ||
| Yeah, of course I did. | ||
| I think that the worst part was before I went to jail. | ||
| It's like you're dying in slow motion. | ||
| Because you know you're going. | ||
| And you can't restart your life. | ||
| It was like I lived in a big house. | ||
| It was like the falling empire of Rome. | ||
| You're watching the house collapse or everything collapse around me, right? | ||
| You know, for me, the amount of pride that I took in rebuilding my life ethically, I can't tell you what that meant to me. | ||
| To go out and prove to myself, to my children, that was really not the world, to my children, that I would just go out and write again. | ||
| And just do things so straight as an arrow and empower people all over the world and make even more money and like to me that was like and that just like was like something that just kept me going in the early days and it just snowballed and fed in itself and fed in itself and um yeah my life today is far better than it ever was back in the craziest times I've just ran. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's got to be a crazy retraining, right? | ||
| To try to do things fully on the up and up. | ||
| We were going to try to do something and I have a feeling we'll do something in the future. | ||
| But even when we were in the little negotiations and then things just moved too fast, you were basically like, just give me something and I'll make it work. | ||
| Like you didn't want to negotiate. | ||
| You were just like, let's make it nice and easy. | ||
| And then things just happened to move along in a different way. | ||
| But like, was that a real shift for you? | ||
| Like how you're going to do business? | ||
| Like actually how you're going to engage in that? | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| I think one of the lessons I learned was that if you're a really good negotiator, right, and you negotiate a deal where it's so great for you and bad for the other people, that's not a good negotiation. | ||
| It just ends up in a lawsuit, a.k.a. | ||
| Steve Madden's shoes. | ||
| Like when Steve came to me, he was very young, he was naive, and I took his company from him legally, and I took 85% Because he didn't know better, and all I did was create animosity down the road. | ||
| So I don't think a great negotiation is when you get such a good deal that you fuck everyone else over. | ||
| And also, I just refuse to cut corners. | ||
| In my life, my value system right now is just simply based on creating value for people. | ||
| So there's a reason why I haven't launched any NFTs yet. | ||
| There's a reason why I haven't launched an FDs, because I'm not sure if the market is ready. | ||
| And I don't know, I'll make a quick $10 million, but probably the people who buy them might lose a quick $7 million. | ||
| So I didn't do it. | ||
| I'd love to have the extra money, but I have enough money. | ||
| I'm not going to engage in transactions or any business practices that I'm not giving more value than I receive. | ||
| And frankly, I've ended up making more money because of that. | ||
| It's my greed shows me. | ||
| If I'm greedy, that means do that. | ||
| Give people more value because you make more in the long run. | ||
| When you see these insane policies of just printing money and then Biden comes out, oh, inflation has nothing to do with printing money, and it's not our fault, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Like, as a guy who understands business, you want to punch the screen or what? | ||
| Yeah, so Biden's an idiot. | ||
| I mean, um, and I think everyone knows that. | ||
| But he's not even, he's a puppet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's like, it's like the movie's so bad. | ||
| Like, it's like, Dave, we're like, let's fight. | ||
| Great movie. | ||
| Where can we find someone so stupid and so malleable and just so much of a puppet. | ||
| They're like, there we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| To be clear, you're not talking about me, Dave. | ||
| There was a movie, Dave, with, uh, Kevin Kline. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Great movie, by the way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Biden is a total puppet. | ||
| And everyone knows this, not making any decisions, right? | ||
| And he says stuff that is, it's idiotic. | ||
| It's just, it's like patently false. | ||
| And anyone that knows the first thing about money and economics and the way the world works, it's just like, it's just silliness. | ||
| And I'm not quite sure why he says it. | ||
| I would think that people would coach him better. | ||
| Do you think they actually, like, I've come to the position that I believe they fundamentally want to, I've said this Destroy the country. | ||
| They either want to fundamentally destroy the country or alter it in a way that nothing that we've known about America will exist anymore. | ||
| And the dream that eventually got our parents to be, you know, middle class in Long Island and we grew up basically in the same exact spot a couple years difference, like that dream of then us doing better, they want to destroy that. | ||
| Because they want us as cogs in the system. | ||
| I'll tell you a little analogy here. | ||
| So my wife's Argentinian, right? | ||
| And the country was destroyed by socialists, by the Perones, the Peronists, right? | ||
| And they're called Peronistas if you're, you know, the party's Peronistas, right? | ||
| My wife's family's wealthy and all those people are anti-Peronista, right? | ||
| And I know there's one of them of the group, it's mostly wealthy people, they're all on the right. | ||
| There's one guy who's a Peronista. | ||
| He's loaded. | ||
| He makes money from the government. | ||
| Oh, you don't say. | ||
| His gig, you get it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's in Paris and he's making all his money by budget and just stealing basically through, you know, unions and stuff like that. | ||
| It's just the biggest hustle ever. | ||
| Like, it's just a hustle. | ||
| So like, you know, they want that because it's just, it's literally people in power. | ||
| There's so much wrong with our system right now. | ||
| And like starting with term limits and professional politicians, like these are all things that are just destroying the country from the inside. | ||
| It's like a rot. | ||
| And there's just like, and it's like, how could they like they pass this thing? | ||
| Everyone has to get a COVID injection, but Congress? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| They also gave themselves a raise this year because they're doing a hell of a job. | ||
| But getting back to your point with things he says about money and printing money, it's just a fact that when you print money it leads to inflation. | ||
| And the worst part is the one thing that we have going for us over the last 50 years since the 70s when Nixon cut a deal with Saudi Arabia stabilizing the dollar as the global reserve currency where it would only be done in dollars in exchange for security guarantees to Saudi Arabia, right? | ||
| That set the dollar firmly as the global reserve currency, the petrodollar, right? | ||
| They're going to China now and pricing contracts in yuan. | ||
| And by cutting off Russia from the banks, which I think is the stupidest thing in the world, all you're doing is you're hastening the move away from the dollar as the global reserve currency. | ||
| And once that's done, All bets are off, because we cannot print money if we're not the reserve currency without having runaway hyperinflation. | ||
| That's how we get away with it, because we're the global reserve currency, so the rules don't apply to us. | ||
| If other countries try to print money like that, then the World Bank comes in, oh, you're a scam. | ||
| They shut the country down. | ||
| It goes into hyperinflation. | ||
| They call in their loans. | ||
| And we don't do that, because we're a global reserve currency. | ||
| And I think that's ending very quick and hastening because of the move with Russia. | ||
| It was a huge error. | ||
| Is the biggest issue that nobody really understands this? | ||
| Like, that nobody really gets? | ||
| I think people understand it. | ||
| Well, I guess a certain set of people do, but that not enough of just the average person. | ||
| They hear Biden say, oh, we're printing more money, and they're like, oh, well, I guess there's more money. | ||
| I think that there's a couple of things, right? | ||
| Number one, yes, a lot of people don't understand it, but there's something else. | ||
| The left is really, really good at using emotionally charged issues to hijack the narrative. | ||
| So, what they do, for example, is like, okay, from a fiscal perspective, cutting Russia off from the dollar is the dumbest thing ever, because it hastens, it forces them to go into China, it forces them away from dollars, and it serves our long-term cause to have the world using dollars. | ||
| But the moral justification is, and that's the most important thing is the moral part. | ||
| So the left is always on the sort of moral high ground that it's like, and I said this before in our last interview, like that the ends justifies the means. | ||
| And I'll tell you, if you go back in history, anytime countries or societies were operating under that paradigm of the ends justifies means, bad shit happened. | ||
| And bad shit happens. | ||
| When the ends justify the means, it ends badly almost every single time. | ||
| Well, nothing's off the table, right? | ||
| Because if it's just about the ends, you'll do anything. | ||
| You're going to end up killing an awful lot of people, putting an awful lot of people | ||
| into poverty. | ||
| Tell me how you can literally take a country on purpose from energy independence and make | ||
| it dependent on foreign energy. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| It's like, it's like, what? | ||
| Because of global warming. | ||
| Because of the, you know, that's the most important thing. | ||
| So again, they hijacked the narrative. | ||
| That's really what's happening. | ||
| They use these things like, it's just like morally, it's like, this is the moral high ground. | ||
| And I think the U.S. | ||
| is like no moral high ground on anything. | ||
| It's like a joke, you know? | ||
| And it's so sad that I'm actually reading Al Jazeera now. | ||
| Like, I use Al Jazeera, and BBC, and New York Times, and Fox. | ||
| I have to read all of them trying to find what's... Can I get some truth out of here? | ||
| I'm reading everything I can get my hands on to try to say, will someone say something different than everybody else? | ||
| You know, it's scary. | ||
| I hate to tell you, but the government of Qatar is probably not giving you the truth either. | ||
| But I get your point. | ||
| I want the opposite. | ||
| I want to bring Tass, for example. | ||
| I want to bring Tass's thing. | ||
| Like, what's the other side? | ||
| I was out for dinner with the Ukrainian right when the invasion started. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, this stuff with Nazification is ridiculous. | ||
| He goes, it's actually true. | ||
| He goes, no, there actually is Nazis. | ||
| And he is so against Putin. | ||
| He hated Putin. | ||
| He was devastated. | ||
| He lost his business. | ||
| He goes, well, that part, though, is actually true. | ||
| So the fact that there's not Nazis, and there's a whole big Nazi issue, and there is a Nazi party. | ||
| Like literal Nazis. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| People can't believe it because we've so ruined the word. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They literally are there, there's a problem with it there, and it's true. | ||
| And the fact that we're denying that, like, why would we deny that? | ||
| Like, okay, Putin could still be an asshole, and that could be true. | ||
| Like, it's more complex, it's nuanced, right? | ||
| I mean, he still has no right to invade a sovereign country, but there are Nazis there, and it is an issue. | ||
| So the Nazis are the good guys now. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| That's how stupid they've made everything. | ||
| Enemy my enemy, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to ask you about FU money. | ||
| Because you hear a lot of people say this, you know, once you get FU money, you can do whatever you want. | ||
| And I would say with very, you know, I know a lot of people now that are very wealthy, some with the B in front of it, some with billions. | ||
| And I would say with the exception of Peter Thiel, who He actually puts his money where his mouth is and says unpopular things. | ||
| I know a lot of rich people that are more afraid, I think, than the average person because you suddenly start feeling you have more to lose. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| So, I think there's different categories of people. | ||
| There's people who are worth over a certain amount where they have fuck you money. | ||
| Whether that's a billion or a hundred million, whatever that is, they have enough money. | ||
| But their businesses are susceptible to public shaming. | ||
| So they have to be careful because they have a fiduciary responsibility. | ||
| They can be canceled by the left. | ||
| So they have to play the game. | ||
| And inside they're probably saying, "This is a bunch of shit and ridiculous nonsense," right? | ||
| But they actually are playing the game that they have to play because they might be rich, | ||
| but they also have responsibilities to shareholds and stuff like that. | ||
| So that's understandable because they just have to do that or else they'll have huge issues. | ||
| Like Disney, I think this guy from Disney really thinks thinks that teaching three-year-olds and five-year-olds | ||
| about transgenderism is a good thing. | ||
| Who could think that? | ||
| Who could possibly think that's a good thing? | ||
| He's digging his own grave and he doesn't even realize it. | ||
| Or maybe he does realize it. | ||
| Do you think he maybe does realize it? | ||
| He's giving it to the mob and I don't understand. | ||
| I don't, you know, listen, you're gay, right? | ||
| And I know it's just such a shock, and you're fucking, you're lucky, because I wish I was gay, because I like guys. | ||
| I'm just not gay. | ||
| I get along really well with guys. | ||
| That'd be a gift. | ||
| I think it's a gift, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, if I could pass it on. | ||
| I know you'd pass it on, right? | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| It's very, I have this theory, okay? | ||
| So let me unpack it for you a little bit here, all right? | ||
| I am but a humble listener. | ||
| Gays were so terribly persecuted. | ||
| Terrible shit happened to gay people. | ||
| It was so fucked up in England, the United States. | ||
| People would go to jail. | ||
| People were committed for being queer. | ||
| So there was a real fucking problem with gay people. | ||
| And a lot of people are gay. | ||
| I think it's a much larger portion of the population is bisexual. | ||
| I think it's a very substantial amount of people. | ||
| It's fucked up that that shit had to change. | ||
| It had to change. | ||
| And Hollywood, which has a large percentage, probably higher than the average, right? | ||
| For whatever reason, because it's arts or whatever, right? | ||
| And some very powerful people, like the Gethins of the world, they did shit. | ||
| They had to do it. | ||
| And it was good. | ||
| And it was good. | ||
| It had to change. | ||
| Wait, what do you mean by it? | ||
| In other words, gays were a person. | ||
| You couldn't come out of the closet. | ||
| It was fucked up to be gay. | ||
| And I think that's disgusting, okay? | ||
| I think it's unfair. | ||
| And I think people should be able to be happy. | ||
| It just doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| I couldn't imagine not being able to love the person I love and marry them. | ||
| I just couldn't imagine living that. | ||
| For you, if you couldn't do that, how could you live that way, right? | ||
| But people still live that way. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| So I think it's good. | ||
| That part is good. | ||
| Oh, you mean that there was representation? | ||
| That it was taken out. | ||
| Oh, I got you. | ||
| It was normalized. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| To me, I think it's normalized, right? | ||
| It's normalized, isn't it? | ||
| You get an award now. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| We're over-normalized. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| But that's good, good, good. | ||
| All good. | ||
| I think it's all good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's not good is then you have this other side of, like, transgender and all these other things that... And people are still entitled. | ||
| That's what you want? | ||
| Great. | ||
| Bravo, live the life you want. | ||
| But we started talking about very, very small, minute percentages, and now you're asking the world to sing to a different tune. | ||
| So what happened was this sort of pendulum swung into madness. | ||
| So what started off as a wonderful thing that needed to happen has turned into some insane, sort of like, almost like a dystopian future where up is down, down is up, right is wrong, and wrong is right. | ||
| And it's like, you see things like Leah Thomas is a perfect symphony, look at that, | ||
| and anyone, if an alien from outer space flew in, say, "What the fuck? | ||
| "Are these people fucking crazy?" | ||
| Like, what does Putin think of that? | ||
| Imagine what Putin's like. | ||
| Well, I think China's pretty freaking happy about it. | ||
| China, like, these, they're saying, "What's wrong with the United States? | ||
| "Like, are they crazy?" | ||
| Well, you know this thing about how on TikTok, in America, it's all of this gender stuff | ||
| with these 15-year-olds doing all the gender stuff, but they ban all of that in China, | ||
| and it's a Chinese company? | ||
| Yeah. - You think that's-- | ||
| I think they're trying to get-- | ||
| You think something's going on there? | ||
| You know, he's the kid around the decade where it's the decay of society. | ||
| Well, this is the decay of normalcy. | ||
| I mean, and I think-- - Yeah, put a swipe at it. | ||
| I think it's very much related to what happened with gay people, because that was a good thing that had to change, but I think it somehow swung into this bizarre alternate universe, and I think we're living that right now. | ||
| And you know the really fucked up part of that as a gay person is that When all that happens, then I see people who start freaking out about gay people. | ||
| And I'm like, I actually somewhat get it at some level. | ||
| Not at the equality level where you have to treat everyone equally, but like the fear because you see them with, they wanna do this five-year-old kids. | ||
| They want them to be able to talk to state teachers and keep that private from the parents. | ||
| But you got, do you admire the, we were talking about branding before and messaging like with COVID, that they got everyone to say, don't say gay, even though gay is not in the bill. | ||
| Like, somebody there is doing some decent messaging. | ||
| Even if you hate the message. | ||
| Yes, but it's pretty easy when you have the entire news apparatus on your side. | ||
| And again, they squash out alternative opinions. | ||
| I give DeSantis a tremendous amount of credit for always standing his ground. | ||
| And, but I think though, like to me at least, I never looked at that as being serious. | ||
| I'm like, this is just nonsense. | ||
| It's just more idiotic, woke nonsense that, and everyone knows this. | ||
| Everyone, I'm assuming that you all know, like you all know this is crazy, that to teach four-year-olds and first graders. | ||
| Apparently, apparently the Disney employees don't know it. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, that's just like the most virtue signaling bullshit. | ||
| I've ever fucking seen. | ||
| It's just nonsense. | ||
| And you know how liberal I am. | ||
| I'm fucking liberal. | ||
| It's just idiocy. | ||
| It's just fucking idiocy. | ||
| We could use a little more like old school New York attitude, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have a common sense. | |
| Common sense. | ||
| Common sense, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I think, you know, it's like you wonder about the righteous wrath of black people. | ||
| And then I watched 12 Years a Slave and I get it. | ||
| So it's always more complicated. | ||
| That's why in some, it's almost like the analogy is like what happened with gay people and this. | ||
| This is like the dystopian end of the gays, like where it's like now not about that anymore. | ||
| It's almost with black people, like there needed to be, I mean, God, when you see things like that, you can't even believe it. | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| Now I'm from a liberal family in Queens. | ||
| Like I knew, but with no prejudice, no one was prejudiced. | ||
| It wasn't like that. | ||
| Isn't it crazy to think back on that? | ||
| It wasn't, at least where we grew up. | ||
| New York, not at all. | ||
| Everybody was sort of there. | ||
| And nobody, I have no recollection of anything like that. | ||
| So I remember when I was young, I was in first grade, second grade, it was bussing. | ||
| they started busing. And there was some riots. I remember this very vaguely, but in my household, | ||
| like there was never like the N-word. There was never anything. It was always like quality, | ||
| you know, like it was just a very liberal household. I didn't see any of that. But I think | ||
| there's other parts of where I grew up in other parts of Queens where there was a lot of animosity | ||
| over blacks being bused in integrating schools. | ||
| It's a very complex issue. | ||
| Yeah, and not to say there was nothing there. | ||
| Robert Moses purposely put the bridges on Long Island low so the buses couldn't get through. | ||
| I mean, so it's not an issue. | ||
| It's a really fucked up history. | ||
| And that's what I was almost saying with the gay stuff, that it's like there was a real problem that needed to be solved, but then it goes into la-la land because it overcorrects itself. | ||
| Is there a business metaphor for that, something like that, where like you accomplish your goals as a business? | ||
| Yeah, Facebook. | ||
| Yeah, if you sort of figure it, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like the gays accomplish the goal of equality, right? | ||
| You can get married, you can adopt kids, you can have kids through surrogacy, all of that stuff. | ||
| The equality, it's here, but then you don't stop. | ||
| There must be like a business version of that. | ||
| Yeah, Facebook. | ||
| You just keep going. | ||
| Let me tell you what happened. | ||
| There's a theory I have on this too, that organizations tend to become exaggerations of what their values are. | ||
| They exaggerate themselves over time. | ||
| They end up becoming more and more and more extreme to what their core values are. | ||
| They become like Stratton became more crazy. | ||
| If it's crazy, a little crazy, it gets crazy, crazy, crazy, crazier. | ||
| The woke becomes more, whoa, whoa. | ||
| It always exaggerates because this echo chamber and this effect that happens of self-reinforcement | ||
| surrounding itself with like-minded people, the ultimate echo chamber is Facebook where | ||
| they skew the algorithms so you only see what you want to see, what you like to hear, so | ||
| your beliefs are reinforced. | ||
| I've watched one of my third wife just become going into the whole the cute thing because | ||
| they fed her this stuff on Facebook. | ||
| I think it's really screwed up. | ||
| When I look at Facebook, the values of that company are just so fucked up. | ||
| I don't think he probably started off as a terrible guy. | ||
| He wanted to get laid. | ||
| He wanted to get laid, right? | ||
| And then it became this gross exaggeration of almost like an Orwellian sort of spoon-feeding people what they want to hear and what you want them to hear at the same time. | ||
| Are you telling me you're not excited to go into the metaverse led by humanoid robot Mark Zuckerberg? | ||
| The good thing about the metaverse is it will not be led by Mark Zuckerberg. | ||
| It will not be, because by the nature of the metaverse and everything about blockchain, it's a decentralizing force. | ||
| So centralized institutions, while they'll play some role, I believe that this next evolution is going to be away from centralized institutions. | ||
| And we see that right now happening in the financial world with these new platforms popping up, like SushiSwap and PancakeSwap. | ||
| These are just names of decentralized exchanges. | ||
| That 15 guys will do more volume, a 15-man company. | ||
| Decentralized can outperform Coinbase that has 8,000 or 15,000 employees. | ||
| It's so much more elegant and effective. | ||
| And I think that over time, I don't think the metaverse will be dominated by people like Zuckerberg. | ||
| I pray it's not. | ||
| So you're pretty, I know this obviously, but you're pretty bullish on crypto and all that. | ||
| Are you surprised that Bitcoin didn't move that much in the last two months after what happened in Canada, where they were freezing bank accounts, and you'd think that Bitcoin would have blown up? | ||
| And then all the Ukraine stuff and the SWIFT system, as you mentioned before, you'd think that Bitcoin right now, or crypto in general, would all be skyrocketing, but it's actually not quite like that at the moment. | ||
| So the way crypto, Bitcoin, solid Bitcoin, It's still in its infancy and until it matures and really becomes more of a currency and a legitimate store of value, whichever one you want to look at it as, it's going to trade mostly like a growth stock. | ||
| It's going to trade like a speculative investment. | ||
| And that means there's going to be times where it's risk-on and risk-off. | ||
| Right now we're in a risk-off environment. | ||
| People are doing flights to safety. | ||
| Six months ago it was more risk-on and the hot money was going into things like Bitcoin and Ethereum. | ||
| So that's part of it. | ||
| Simply, it was very much correlated with the stock market. | ||
| As the stock market, you know, stocks are going up, Bitcoin is going up, right? | ||
| Is that partly just because people have more money then and they're just like, I'll just put more money into Bitcoin too because I have more money? | ||
| Partially, but what's happening is when people are scared, Bitcoin is still not mature enough that people look at it as a flight to safety. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| It was supposed to be that and it probably will be that, but it's still not there yet. | ||
| And Bitcoin is still manipulated. | ||
| In other words, there's still some very big people that fuck with it, right? | ||
| But I think generally speaking right now, I think what you're seeing is that you've, I think it's healthy for Bitcoin, is you have this trading range of like, you know, 35, whatever it is, to the high with 60, and that's okay. | ||
| And I think it takes time. | ||
| Like, you know, when Bitcoin crashed down to $3,000 or $2,000, it stayed there for a while, and then ultimately it has another rally. | ||
| So I think it's building a base right now, and then ultimately it will go substantially higher. | ||
| You know, and again, that's just my point. | ||
| I tell you to buy because of that. | ||
| But, you know, I think that the nature of Bitcoin, the scarcity, the stickiness that people tend to hold it for the long term, there's a lot of things that I think are over the long term putting upward pressure on the price. | ||
| What are you doing with your money these days? | ||
| Like, what are you, in this like crazy time that we're in? | ||
| I am heavily into the crypto, DeFi, metaverse, very much into that. | ||
| And, but I don't have to invest my money so much. | ||
| It's not what I do really. | ||
| My model is more people will actually give me stakes in their companies for, in exchange for advice | ||
| and using my brand. | ||
| So I have a very, sort of a very much of a risk-free model of getting involved in companies. | ||
| Now, when companies that are bigger and more, I'll tell you, the better deals, I'll put money in. | ||
| I don't mind doing that, but very often the more speculative deals, | ||
| they're looking for advice. | ||
| They're looking for, to get connections opened up to them. | ||
| So I do a lot of that. | ||
| And they also invest in the off blockchain world as well. | ||
| I have a great ice tea company that I'm involved, which is blowing up right now. | ||
| So, you know, for me, you can pip them out. | ||
| Yeah, well, you can buy the product, you can buy the ice tea, which is great. | ||
| It's called Montauk Ice Tea. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's great ice tea. | ||
| It's all over the place in the Northeast right now. | ||
| It'll go nationwide this year, throughout the year. | ||
| But, you know, Here's what I believe. | ||
| The safest, best investment in the world for anybody. | ||
| You want an investment tip? | ||
| Ready for this? | ||
| Buy the S&P 500 in a Vanguard, no load, mutual fund. | ||
| Hold it, reinvest the dividends, and just set it and forget it. | ||
| And that is your best bet of all. | ||
| So that does show me you're still bullish on America to some degree, right? | ||
| Well, listen, again, I think that America values its global positioning, and I said the middle class is going to get squeezed. | ||
| But the 500 largest corporations, they're running this show anyway. | ||
| They're behind all this whole military-industrial complex. | ||
| I mean, they're in charge. | ||
| And what you're doing is when you're buying that, you're buying the collective ingenuity of America. | ||
| And for all faults, the system is amazing. | ||
| What we have here is an economic system. | ||
| It's powerful. | ||
| It rewards hard work. | ||
| It rewards ingenuity. | ||
| And unlike other countries where success is frowned on, standing out is frowned on, here we worship or we emulate, we elevate people who have taken risks and make a lot of money. | ||
| What would you do if you were CEO of one of these companies that was going woke? | ||
| So if you were the head of Disney right now, Knowing everything I know about you, and now the company seems like it's in upheaval, and the board's angry at you, and people are bored. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to gauge how much of it's real, but if you had a general sense of what's going on right now, and they're coming to you, what would you do different than this guy? | ||
| I'd probably lose my job. | ||
| Yeah, because I would simply, I would have, what I would have done and I would have never let it get this far, I would have been having this, I believe the problem usually comes way before that. | ||
| It's like this virus, this cancer that's forming and spreads and it spreads and it's allowed to keep spreading and before you know it, the inmates are ruling the asylum. | ||
| So I would have been, you know, carefully, or let's say, almost daily messaging, you know, things that were against that whole thing, supporting, as you know, I feel about gay people, whatever, but I would, you know, have a very, very different type of corporate culture. | ||
| But that said, you know, in the way the world works right now, it's almost like you get canceled like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, it's pretty high and mighty of me to say I'll stick to my core beliefs, but, you know, I might have to be forced to simply, for fiduciary responsibility, or I'd be fired as the CEO for not pretending to be woke. | ||
| Do you think that's the move, is that so many of these companies probably, even if they don't fully get it, are maybe not taking care of their fiduciary responsibility? | ||
| Meaning they're not making the right decisions for the company. | ||
| Yeah, let me give you the crux. | ||
| You just brought up a great point, okay? | ||
| It's the ultimate diversion play. | ||
| But whoa, we love the environment, and we love gay people and transgender, and we're gonna fucking destroy people in sweatshops in Indonesia, and we're gonna destroy, literally, there's such awfulness. | ||
| Nike, I mean, what they're doing, these companies are exploiting people all over the world, they're polluting, they're doing all this terrible shit, raping and pillaging the village on a fucking daily basis, pretty much, all of them, almost without exception, with some less than others, but they're woke. | ||
| They're good corporate, they're good citizens of the world. | ||
| So it's the ultimate thing for like Apple to say that we're woke. | ||
| They're a bad guy in a Disney movie, that's what I keep telling them. | ||
| It's like literally it's that, it's that much of a like, we're woke, we're good people, we're moral, we're moral, we're moral. | ||
| And they're just from destruction, destruction. | ||
| So they, and their left is amazing at that. | ||
| They just march here, we're woke, we're woke. | ||
| That means we can spill as much oil as we want, we can exploit as many people from undeveloped countries as we want, we can just like literally avoid taxes and keep money in different countries and use clever transfer mechanisms so we don't pay our fair share of taxes. | ||
| But whoa, we're good, we're good. | ||
| But they'll give you a shelf on Hulu that says Black Lives Matter or something. | ||
| We love the environment! | ||
| Ugh, it's gross! | ||
| And the Black Lives Matter guys, aren't they in jail now? | ||
| Under indictment? | ||
| What happened to Black Lives Matter? | ||
| Did they solve it? | ||
| It was like a scam, right? | ||
| So this great cause, like, what's Black Lives Matter? | ||
| White Lives Matter? | ||
| Yellow Lives Matter? | ||
|
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Lives Matter, right? | |
| But these people are just like freaking crooks. | ||
| They're under indictment, aren't they? | ||
| They're under indictment, and the woman that was the head bought three houses in Malibu or something? | ||
| Stop it! | ||
| Did they send one? | ||
| Well, she's got nothing on what's-her-name on, uh... Who's the one from the, uh... | ||
| The ascendant from the west represented Maxine Waters. | ||
| Oh, Maxine Waters. | ||
| She's got like a $20 million house in Hancock Park while she's running Crenshaw or something. | ||
| I mean, these people, isn't it? | ||
| But that's what I always tell people. | ||
| It's like, you gotta admire the monster. | ||
| Yeah, but by the way, they don't even touch fucking Argentina. | ||
| Yeah, at the level of corruption. | ||
| There's a woman in Argentina, this woman, like, Christina or something or other, who's, like, literally, like, just, she runs the whole fucking country. | ||
| Oh, she's, like, the wealthiest woman in the world. | ||
| She's, like, a Putin of Argentina, this woman, and everyone loves her, and she's, like, raping and pillaging, and she's, like, fucking, you know, the kid Sinta. | ||
| Thank you, Christina, for the house, roof over our head, and the food notarial. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Hopefully this will air after I get back from Argentina. | ||
| I'll be shocked when I'm in Argentina. | ||
| Yeah, you could be in a lot of trouble in Argentina. | ||
| No, but it's amazing that you see this weird undercurrent of politics. | ||
| It's almost like I hate to say this. | ||
| They don't really mean it, but there's some part, I mean, like, I like just G, because at least you know what you're getting. | ||
| You know it's completely corrupt and no rights, you have no rights. | ||
| Okay, got it, that's the play, I like to say the play field. | ||
| It's almost like better than like, I'm gonna say like, they're pretending to be different. | ||
| I don't really mean it. | ||
| It's so twisted. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I heard Bill Maher, maybe a year ago, say something like that, like, they can get shit done because they're not messing around. | ||
| There's something admirable about that. | ||
| But, and here I know people are going to cut this exact part to make us look like we're supporting China, but it comes at an obvious, insane cost. | ||
| Everything that we love about life is the cost of them being able to build a city real quick. | ||
| But not what they love about life. | ||
| I think one thing I've learned from traveling around the world so much is that the world doesn't share our values. | ||
| Many countries don't really care that much about free speech. | ||
| They don't value it like we do. | ||
| They didn't grow up with it. | ||
| It's not part of their core belief systems. | ||
| People in Russia love Putin. | ||
| I was there a few years back. | ||
| Everyone loves this guy. | ||
| We love a strong leader. | ||
| We don't care. | ||
| We just want a strong leader. | ||
| That's what they want there. | ||
| All right, now they're probably having second thoughts right now, I'm guessing, right? | ||
| It's a little hard to tell, don't you think? | ||
| Like, you know, we keep saying the meme is like we've destroyed Russia. | ||
| I don't believe any of that. | ||
|
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Yeah! | |
| I don't believe any of it, by the way. | ||
| I'm not saying that we haven't, but I don't believe any of it. | ||
| But why aren't we seeing videos coming out of Russia? | ||
| I don't know, riots in the streets, toppling the, you know, whatever. | ||
| Here's the same analogy. | ||
| Like, I was out for dinner with a Ukrainian who hated Putin, who was devastated over the invasion. | ||
| He's like, yeah, we have Nazis. | ||
| It's like there's more to this whole thing. | ||
| There's issues. | ||
| Ukraine was part of Russia. | ||
| It's much more complicated than the world's... I don't know why. | ||
| It's just... Listen, again, I think it's a terrible thing. | ||
| Isn't it annoying to have to do the caveats every time you're talking about something? | ||
| It's really sad, but the bottom line is that this is not... | ||
| Enough to start World War III. | ||
| And I resent when someone like Zelensky, who's a US citizen, says, if you don't save us, it's World War III. | ||
| What? | ||
| I mean, like, what? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't want World War III. | ||
| So we don't help you? | ||
| We don't give you more guns and ammunition? | ||
| It's World War III? | ||
| I don't believe that for a fucking second, just so you know. | ||
| I don't believe it for a second. | ||
| I don't think there's any way Putin will ever go into a NATO country. | ||
| No way. | ||
| I don't think that's going to happen. | ||
| And by the way, I think Putin's looking like a paper tiger a little bit right now. | ||
| But I think also to give a madman, and it seems like he's a madman right now. | ||
| No, maybe he's not. | ||
| But it seems like he's acting that way. | ||
| You need to give a madman an exit ramp. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, let's give the madman, especially one with nukes. | ||
| You got 5,000 nuclear bombs, let's give the guy an exit ramp. | ||
| And maybe it's OK that he takes part of Ukraine and that becomes part of Russia and people | ||
| stop dying. | ||
| Why not think more pragmatically than Putin bad, Ukraine good? | ||
| I just don't believe that for a fucking split second. | ||
| Jordan, you'd have to think for a minute. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The people on CNN are going to be telling people that they are allowed to think? | ||
| Even like the people on Fox, with the exception of Tucker, who finally said what I was thinking. | ||
| I've been thinking that the whole time. | ||
| My wife, I've been saying it to her, she's like, really? | ||
| She's like, it's so terrible. | ||
| I'm like, it is terrible. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| But there's more to this than they're saying. | ||
| Much more than they're saying. | ||
|
unidentified
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And here's another part to this whole thing. | |
| When the whole world gangs up on one thing that you have to know, it's like the certainty everyone else has has to tell you there's something wrong. | ||
| Isn't that the thing? | ||
| That's, I think, the thing that's got my bell going off about this. | ||
| I'm not saying I know exactly what's right and I'm with you. | ||
| You can't just invade a sovereign nation. | ||
| Okay, nobody's defending Putin. | ||
| But to watch the swarm, basically every single person... Except China and Saudi Arabia and the UAE. | ||
| So is that really, do you feel like we're actually in the midst of it? | ||
| I mean, Biden said it just a couple days ago. | ||
| New world order is on the way. | ||
| Odd he didn't say that during the election. | ||
| Do you remember him saying anything about a new world order coming? | ||
| This guy has done more damage to the country. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's like almost a talent. | ||
| And you could destroy something that quickly in just two years. | ||
| With Trump, you could hate Trump. | ||
| There's no way this would have ever happened with Trump as president. | ||
| No fucking way. | ||
| Trump is looking pretty freaking good right now, right? | ||
| No way this would happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No way. | ||
| And not because Putin thinks he's a madman. | ||
| This wouldn't have happened because, you know, there was just, there was just like this. | ||
| And by the way, I mean, just Putin, so he calls Putin a war criminal. | ||
| Well, that's helpful for, that's going to make the war stop. | ||
| So now you give the guy no chance. | ||
| He can never stop because if he loses, he goes to the Hague and gets hung at the Hague. | ||
| So now you create no possible peace solution. | ||
| That's the fucking arms manufacturers moving Biden's lips. | ||
| War, war, war, death, death, death, money, money, money, okay? | ||
| And instability, instability. | ||
| It's so fucking obvious. | ||
| Like, how could he say that? | ||
| It's like, I was like, what a moron, you know? | ||
| And they keep telling us we're not going to World War III, we're not going to World But we're going to arm the guy. | ||
| We're going to talk about a no-fly zone so that we'd have to shoot down planes. | ||
| We're going to cut them off the banking system. | ||
| Like, we're doing an awful lot of shit. | ||
| I don't know where you have to sign the doc that says... He's begging for a no-fly zone? | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| I mean, you want to destroy my country, too, Zelensky? | ||
| I mean, really? | ||
| I mean, I understand you're in a bad spot, but, like, do you want to destroy the world? | ||
| You want to take the whole, that's what will happen. | ||
| You still put a no-fly zone there, that's it. | ||
| They won't do it. | ||
| It won't happen. | ||
| There's no no-fly zone. | ||
| I don't care what Putin does. | ||
| It can't be that stupid to go head-to-head with throwing 5,000 nuclear bombs. | ||
| But we've got a lot of wizards who got us into a lot of other words that are telling us a no-fly zone will be just fine. | ||
| Sure, they've never gotten anything right before, but, you know, the people... Maybe this is the one? | ||
| Some of the generals that are saying that are just people that are saying they want to go on TV. | ||
| They can't possibly believe one... I forgot who it was saying, yeah, you could have this... We could have this humanitarian no-flaws... Oh, yeah, sure. | ||
| The humanitarian corridor, that's what they call it. | ||
| That's going to work out really fucking well, you know? | ||
| And I also think that, by the way, I just... | ||
| Yeah, and we go on and on about this. | ||
| I just think that arming Ukraine is just causing more lives to be lost. | ||
| It's just killing more Ukrainians. | ||
| Belfort, finish me up with this. | ||
| The world's nutty. | ||
| Okay, everyone gets it. | ||
| We moved to Florida. | ||
| Life is good here. | ||
| You're feeling good about life. | ||
| When I do my show, my daily show every day, I'm always trying to tell people at the end, like, I don't want you to get crazy about politics. | ||
| I want you to do something you're supposed to be doing. | ||
| Give the people the Jordan bell for, like, why everything's gonna be okay and why you gotta just keep going, even if you're worried that it's not gonna be okay. | ||
| Oh, no, I think it's everything's gonna be okay. | ||
| See, what happens is, even when, like, there's a recession, they say there's a 3% contraction of the economy, what does that really mean? | ||
| So, if you made $50,000 last year and then suddenly your income goes to $48,500, You're still paying your rent, you're cutting back a little bit, but you're still living. | ||
| I think what happens is people that are living empowered lives, people that are willing to work hard and put one foot in front of the other, you're gonna be okay. | ||
| There's always a path forward to make money, to live a great life, to be empowered in this country, in the United States, right? | ||
| It just makes it a little bit harder. | ||
| They just make it harder. | ||
| Instead of having a tailwind, you have a little bit of a headwind. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| You just pedal a little bit faster. | ||
| Listen, when I got out of jail, I was saddled with a very large fine. | ||
| And by law, the maximum they could make me pay is 25% of my income. | ||
| You know what I said to myself when I got out of jail? | ||
| I said, I'm not going to try to evade this fine. | ||
| I'm just going to make so much fucking money that the 25% won't even be a pimple on my ass. | ||
| And that was my attitude. | ||
| I'll make so much money. | ||
| I'll just pay that. | ||
| Win-win for everybody. | ||
| How quick did you knock it out? | ||
| Well, no, I still pay, but... Oh, you're still... But there's no one getting... No, there's no more investors left. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Investors, there's no more investors. | ||
| Investors haven't gotten money for 10 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just like, another two years, I've got to pay this. | |
| It's ridiculous, okay? | ||
| But the point is, I never try to look at that as, I mean, well, then I'll just either stop working or I'll try not to pay. | ||
| No, I'll just work even harder. | ||
| So if the world gets a bit tougher, If politicians like Biden create a playing field that's just sort of tilted against you, just pedal a little bit faster. | ||
| It's worth it, because you know what? | ||
| You know, we live once, right? | ||
| And where you are in your life, right? | ||
| You can't control what happens randomly, but you are the master. | ||
| You're running your ship. | ||
| You're the master of your own destiny. | ||
| You have the ability. | ||
| I don't care who you are, as long as you're healthy, you're breathing, You can improve a lot in life if you want. | ||
| Every human being has the ability to get ahead in this country. | ||
| If you're somewhere else, I can't. | ||
| Some countries, it's difficult. | ||
| But even there, you can always get ahead. | ||
| And I think that all of this stuff is noise. | ||
| It's disturbing. | ||
| You can worry about it. | ||
| Yes, you can worry about it. | ||
| But to think For a second, and it will stop you from living an empowered life, that's a story that you tell yourself as an excuse because you're not willing to do what it takes to get what you want in life. | ||
| And I firmly believe that, that it's a story that you tell yourself that, oh, it's the government, it's the economy, it's my parents, it's the news, it's all story. | ||
| And once you stop with that story and learn what you have to learn, go out there and do what you gotta do, you can get ahead in this world. | ||
| So do we start a company now or do we drink tequila? | ||
| I think we drink tequila. | ||
| Jordan Belfort, ladies and gentlemen! | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about lifestyles instead of non-stop yelling, check out our lifestyle playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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