Jordan Belfort relocates from LA to Miami due to high taxes and polarization, criticizing pandemic lockdowns as fear-driven brainwashing and labeling Fauci's influence a mass delusion. He defends Putin against Western aggression, arguing sanctions accelerate the U.S. loss of reserve currency status while advocating for S&P 500 investments via Vanguard despite corporate hypocrisy. Belfort claims Biden's rhetoric threatens World War III by provoking Putin, urging listeners to ignore recession fears and take action to master their destiny rather than listening to political noise. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.