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Jan. 30, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:19
20240130_piers-morgan-uncensored-jordan-belfort
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Surviving the Cancel Cult 00:06:03
Tonight Opium's Morgan Uncensored, he's a best-selling author, a rock star stockbroker and a master salesman.
Just about everybody knows him as the real Wolf of Wall Street.
Jordan Belfort gives his blistering verdict on the economy, on Trump's comeback, on working with Leo and Margot Robbie, and how much of that movie was not only true, but could be made today.
The Wolf of Wall Street, the real one, is uncensored.
So Jordan, well great to see you, first of all.
It's been 11 years since I last interviewed you at CNN.
The movie just came out, right?
The Wolf of Wall Street had just come out.
Your life was literally exploding in a way you didn't really understand what was going to happen.
What's been your life like since then?
You know, the movie, and it was a special movie, Leo Martin.
Brilliant film.
Incredible job.
And it just became like the greatest, the biggest cult hit, one of the biggest in history.
And I am grateful for that.
And, you know, again, it was great to have that platform and I used that to really build my business of speaking and mentoring around the world.
I've written other books since, new one now, right?
Wolf of Investing.
But it's been a wild ride to say the least, you know, but I'm proud of this time.
Well, you don't look a lot different.
You're looking good, Nate.
It was $400 million at the box office.
I think it took a lot more elsewhere, right?
Right.
Well, you know, again, the box office did great, but it was the single most pirated movie in history that year.
Beat Froze it.
It was like I think 200 million illegal downloads.
There is an irony about a movie about you being the most piratical.
There's two reasons for that.
Number one, because it was, you had to be over 18 or 17 to watch.
It's a lot of kids downloaded.
And also, in many countries, because of all the cursing, there's 506 F-bombs, right?
You know, the movie was like 50 minutes long in a lot of Islamic countries.
They couldn't air a lot of it.
Really?
To watch the real movie, you had to watch it online by illegally downloading.
And then it just kept going and going.
It became this massive cult.
There was songs written about me and the movie.
It just never would have expected that, but I'm grateful for it, you know?
When I watched it again the other day, and I thought I might interview you when I came here, it was fascinating to me to think about when you were in your office environment at its craziest, how you would possibly have survived today's world, today's human resource control world, today's cancel culture world.
You know, you think about a woman who shaved her head in the office in the room for $10,000 to get breast implants.
The dwarf brought in to be thrown at a Velcro dartboard.
Probably wouldn't go over too well today, right?
Jonah Hill, you know, his character eating a goldfish, which I know did happen, et cetera, et cetera.
When you look at it, you chuckle about what would have happened today.
Listen, you know, on some level, right, a lot of the stuff that doesn't happen anymore, it's good in some level, but on some level, it's bad because we also had a hell of a lot of fun.
Prostitute people loved going to work there.
So I think on some level this woke stuff is taking fun out of the workplace.
Offices have become the most boring places on God's Earth.
You used to go there and a lot of people would meet their ultimate life mate.
40% of people used to meet their spouse at work.
What happens now?
I don't know.
How does it even start?
Online, I guess.
Right?
But I mean, it's insane.
You have to be so careful nowadays, right?
We just got very boring.
I mean, when you look at what your life was like, I know you cleaned up your act, but have we just got very boring?
I think that the death of everything started with the smartphone.
You know, you used to be able to get away with stuff.
Like, it wasn't being collated, photographed, and posted online.
Social media has turned everything into basically, you know, a fishbowl and a cesspool.
Would you have felt neutered by a cell phone?
I think so, but I can't imagine us being any different than we were.
We were young and wild.
And I've watched it slowly, incrementally get more sane the world, so to speak.
Then it just got nuts with all the woke stuff, you know, and it was necessary.
So some of the stuff was in me too, was necessary, but a lot of it is like anything else.
It's wild over correction.
It goes to the other side.
And it's got to, now hopefully it's starting to make its way back to the middle.
So hopefully we'll end up in a better version of what we once had, which was the fun without some of the madness, but still some madness.
I think it's still good.
When you go out and about and you're in a restaurant or a bar or whatever, is there just a constant pressure from people for you to be that guy?
Like people, you know, listen, people always come up to me and they're always really nice and they love the movie, they love the books, they love my speeches.
But a lot of them say like, you know, was it really that crazy?
It was worse.
We were wild.
Well, you told me last time, I think it was maybe at your bachelor party, that something happened that was so depraved.
Yeah.
You couldn't even tell me on air.
Yeah, and even though it was on your...
Your show is called uncensored.
Yeah, well, it's so bad.
I really, I gotta say, you know, I have a wife now for the last four years, great young, beautiful, amazing wife.
Does she know what it was?
Thankfully, when we first met, she spoke Spanish, not English.
Now she speaks fluent English, right?
So, you know, in the beginning, she couldn't quite figure it out, but I think now she's like, I don't even want to know.
But there's people still missing from my bachelor party.
They never found them.
It was like, you know, 15 years ago, 25 years ago.
No one knows where they are.
But, you know, it was pretty wild.
You said a really interesting thing last time we met, and it was that you spent a lot of time with Leo DiCaprio.
And apart from the fact he'd never taken drugs, and you had to show him what it's like when you're off your head on Quelludes, which he managed to replicate very convincingly from what I hear.
But it was interesting to me.
You were talking about, there was a quote I read to you from Leo in which he had completely accepted that there were two Jordan Belforts.
Right.
Life before incarceration and life after incarceration.
He'd absolutely respected that journey you'd been on and was incredibly praiseworthy about you as a human being, which meant a lot to you at the time.
It did, yeah.
The Bitcoin Portfolio Mistake 00:11:50
But do you get that from everyone?
Or are there still a lot of people who say, you know what, I watched the movie and it's fine, but there were a lot of people that you took to the cleaners with your criminal activity and we shouldn't be celebrating someone like you.
Do you still get that or not?
A lot less after the crisis in 2008, 2009.
I think people have come to realize that Wall Street is a very dangerous place and it's very hard pressed to find any firm that if you look at, for example, any great financial crime, who's in the middle?
Usually Goldman Sachs, right?
And that's not to say they don't do great things as well.
And this book that I wrote is about that.
Because Wall Street is massively corrupt, right?
It's an unlevel playing field that puts the little guy at a huge disadvantage.
Yet, Wall Street still creates massive value and it's necessary for the economy.
So the question is, how do you participate?
How do you extract your fair share of the value that Wall Street creates without getting sucked into the dark side, which I was once a part of, and get your money either taken from you quickly or slowly or just get bled dry by engaging in things they recommend like short-term trading.
To people I know that knew you in your heyday, they said the thing about Jordan was he would have been a billionaire anyway without any criminal activity.
You were that good as a trader, as a guy that understood money, that you didn't ever need to cross that line.
You talk very openly and honestly about crossing the line.
I'm not going to re-legislate all that, but it was interesting to me that people felt you had that natural thing and your success as a sort of motivational speaker and advisor and you write these hugely popular books and so on.
When you read them, you think, well, this guy's just really smart.
And you are.
Well, I can thank my parents for that.
But, you know, I think, yeah, it's true.
And I think the sad part is, is if I wouldn't have taken that left turn at Albuquerque, so to speak, right?
I probably would have made like 10 or 20 billion because I would have hit the internet bubble and I was taking companies public.
So yeah, I think one of the lessons, and it's not in this book, this is more on how to invest your money wisely without getting sucked in.
But in other books I've written, I speak about like one of the biggest mistakes people make is that, yeah, you could cut a few corners and make money a little bit quicker.
But the big money, the real big money, that takes time and you can't cut corners because if you do, there's something you can cover.
But I mean, but I mean, you can't just go, you're not giving value to people.
If you're not providing some massive value, that's not going to be sustainable.
To make the billions, you got to be giving value.
And you could always monetize value, but you got to be giving value.
Somebody watching this who maybe likes to dabble a bit in stocks and shares and so on, maybe a bit of property, whatever it may be.
What is the best way to be successful with money, to beat the system which is so skewed against the ordinary guy?
So this is really simple, and this is what the book is about.
So property is a separate issue here.
But talking about stocks, like, you know, there's two parts of money.
Okay, you got to make a certain amount of money, right?
And you also have to not spend more than you make.
That's like sort of the budgeting side of things, right?
But assuming that you make some amount of money, of some bit left over, whether it's small or large, the real question is what do you do with that money?
How do you put that money to work in the markets so that when you're ready to retire one day, you have a giant nest egg waiting for you?
And the irony is that all the things that you might think you should do are what you shouldn't be doing.
Like, for example, trying to find a young winning stock and then, you know, buy it and sell it and make a big profit or time the market or, you know, which sector should I be in?
All that stuff is just work.
Human beings by nature are terrible stock pickers.
We sell when we should buy, we buy when you should sell.
The simple way is you want to buy the entire market as an index, the S ⁇ P 500.
And you want to buy it and hold it.
And you could start with a little bit of money or a lot of it.
It could be $10,000, it could be a million dollars, right?
But the key is you want to make a little contributions every month, every quarter, right?
And let time do the headwind.
Okay, but what about the Warren Buffett way?
That's his way.
Well, his way, he actually believes, he studies individual companies very, very carefully.
Right.
And then he invests for the long term in companies that he believes are very well run and have a regular cash flow.
So people, you know, American Express, Coca-Cola, all that kind of stuff.
And he's one of the wealthiest investors in history.
Is that really what you're talking about?
Well, you choose...
Yes.
I mean, he has a portfolio of stocks, but he's in there for the very long term.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
If you ask Warren Buffett, he says this exact thing.
I did ask him, and that's what he said.
Buy the S ⁇ P 500, buy all the best companies and hold them for the long-term use.
How many should you have?
All of them.
It's 500.
That's right, all 500.
You buy it in one trade.
It's the most economical tax.
And you buy the whole shebank.
Buy all of them.
Why?
That's not what Warren does.
On some level, it is.
Now, again.
He only has like under 20 stocks he owns, right?
There's a difference, though.
There are about maybe three or four people in the world that can beat the S ⁇ P 500.
He's one of them.
All these other hedge funds and mutual funds, they don't even beat the index each year.
On average, they underperform the index.
And after all their fees and commissions and performance bonuses.
Okay, but I just want to throw it back here.
Part of the thing of being an investor in the stock market is the fun of it.
It's a bit like betting on horses.
Right.
Right?
You're sucking the fun out of it with this strategy.
No.
Because you're saying just put it all into this thing.
Yeah.
Nothing, you know, it's not going to, all you'll see is that one index fluctuating in value.
Right.
Up and down, and probably over time it'll be ticking up.
It's very safe.
It's very un-early Jordan.
Right.
Well, here's the difference, though.
Where's the fun?
The fun is you should set aside 5% to 10% of your money and do exactly what you're saying.
Have fun, speculate, trading it out.
But listen, you know what's fun?
Retiring and being freaking rich.
You know what sucks and it's no fun?
Retiring and being freaking poor.
Okay?
As I always say in the movie, I've been rich, I've been poor.
I choose rich every time.
Where are you?
Where are you now?
Thankfully, I'm wealthy.
How rich are you now?
I don't want to say, but I thankfully do very well.
Can I guess?
Can you guess?
You can guess.
If I was a guessing man from when I last saw you to now, 30 million.
Okay, well, listen.
Dollars.
Again, I do very, very well.
Am I in the ballpark?
I don't want to say.
Up or down?
I don't want to say.
More or less.
I don't want to say.
Come on.
No, I don't want to.
Give me a bonus.
I really don't want to say.
I did very, very well.
Why are you so reticent?
This is a guy that used to boast about this part.
It's because, you know, I think that as an older and wiser person right now, I don't think it's important how much I'm worth.
Okay, what's important is that I do really, really well.
I have everything I want.
People are going to read your book, The Wolf of Investing, right?
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
They're going to read this and go, well, all right, but how much is he worth it?
Because that will dictate whether I believe.
If you can go online and they have my net worth posted as $100 million, is that what it says?
I have no idea how they got that figure.
No idea at all.
But that's what it says.
Why it says it, I have no idea.
So that's three times what I guess.
But I have no idea.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but that's what the online says.
And I have no idea.
Why are you instructing me to go and check that online?
Because you're pressing me.
I'm just kidding.
That's my way out, by the way.
But I'll tell you this.
One thing no one ever accused me of is not knowing how to make money.
No.
I've been accused of many things.
But I also know.
Never that.
But knowing you, I also know you would know how much you're worth to the nearest dollar.
No, actually, believe it or not, I'm not like that.
That's more like my dad.
I was never a counter of money.
I was just an earner of money.
My philosophy, which I don't suggest to most people, is, you know, just make so much money that you don't have to worry about spending money.
That has always been my philosophy.
They looked at my asshole with a freaking microscope, right?
And you know what they found after five years?
Zero.
My godfather, who's been very successful, he just said to me, the only bit of advice I give you, he said, is get to f ⁇ you money as soon as possible.
There you go.
And I said, what do you mean?
He went, to the extent where you have enough money where you can tell anybody, f ⁇ you, and walk away.
So someone in a job that you've got is giving you a hard time or whatever, and I've actually acted on this.
You can just literally walk away because you're not reliant on that thing or that person for money to buy food in the morning.
Well, there's f ⁇ ing money.
And then there's Elon Musk.
Right.
He literally says, f ⁇ to the people.
To the people who he needs to give money to.
That's the real definition of f ⁇ ing money.
But I agree.
Listen, let me, getting back to what you said, right?
The mistake people make when they invest, because you're right, you have to have fun.
And specifically, I say you should speculate.
And I go through how to speculate carefully, have fun, make money.
But the bottom line is if you think that you can take your money that you save and speculate, you're going to end up okay, you're not.
You're going to mostly get destroyed because the playing field is dramatically tipped against you.
When you go to a casino, right, and you walk into a casino, the odds are stacked against you, right?
So over time, you're going to lose.
You might win once a while, but over time you lose.
Some people enjoy going even if they lose money.
But it gets worse, though, because this is not just a casino, Wall Street.
It's a corrupt casino where the dice are stacked or loaded, the cards are being dealt from the bottom of the deck.
So it's not a fair playing field.
So it's a double whammy.
It's the odds are against you naturally, and then it's also stacked against you because it's corrupt.
There's corruption there.
And there's things that are illegal, like short-term, high-frequency trading.
There's inside information all over the place.
There's just better deals given to the bigger investors.
So the answer is you extract the value by investing in the S ⁇ P 500.
And by the way, they're constantly changing out companies.
So you always have the best companies.
And then you still have the fun by taking some money that you have and do whatever you want.
You want to go and buy and sell crypto and tokens or NFTs or shooting.
Do you believe in Bitcoin?
Yes, I do believe in Bitcoin.
So that's all Jamie Diamond saying he just thinks it's all hot air.
And listen, I respectfully just, I once thought that too.
Okay, I did.
But again, when you look at something like Bitcoin, it's like one of those things where truly the lie can become the truth if enough people say it's true.
But isn't it a case of if there's enough mugs out there, they'll all trade it with each other, and it'll go up.
Well, yes, but over it, but you have some really smart mugs these days.
You know, you have some of the most sophisticated people starting to embrace it.
So I think most of crypto is complete bullshit.
Cryptocurrency, I can understand, and Jamie Diamond was saying that, that you can use cryptocurrency in a perfectly legitimate way and it's very useful.
The actual system.
Blockchain, the underlying technology.
The blockchain technology.
Yeah.
That technology is very useful and is widely used.
His argument was more about the kind of Bitcoin stuff which just seems to be based on a sack of sand.
Well, on some level, that's true, but you can make the same case for fiat currencies where they're printing dollars and just printing more dollars anytime they see fit.
But one thing about Bitcoin is there's a finite amount of Bitcoin.
And I would agree in the early days, yes, it was mostly used for fraud and scamming and evading.
It's not the case anymore.
There's a lot of really sophisticated people who are buying Bitcoin now that it has, there's EFTs, you know, it's completely ETS, but it's completely changed now.
So I think Bitcoin is legit.
But the problem is there's all these other coins and cryptos that are worthless.
And they've really been, they're like the penny stocks of crypto.
And they're basically been issued by people that want to separate others from their money.
Freedom Behind Bars 00:08:30
And those should be avoided.
You mentioned penny stocks.
It was that that led you down the wrong path, wasn't it?
Yes.
That stuff early on.
And it ended up with you losing your liberty.
What was the worst moment for you?
When it all went wrong, when you look back, what was the moment you would least want to relive?
When I was asked to wear a wire, and I did, and it was a friend, and I...
You seem to see in the film.
And I slipped him a note because I didn't want to wrap my...
I thought I was being a stand-up guy.
So that's in the movie.
Right, it's true.
And I thought I was doing the right thing as a man, and I slipped the guy a note saying, don't incriminate yourself, right?
And I walked away from that saying, you know what, I maintain my integrity because I'm not a rat.
And then three months later, they came back to me and the guy ratted me out.
And at that moment in time, like literally, I lost all faith in humanity.
And I was facing 20 years in jail.
They could have broken my agreement if it was not for the FBI agent who indicted me.
He was a great guy.
He understood and like they gave me a second chance because that could have destroyed my life.
That was the low point for sure.
That moment when you think like I'm not a rat and then you it's so that's the Jonah Hill character.
But that's not true.
But in reality, it was not the Jonah Hill character.
They collapsed like three or four people into that character, right?
It was someone else.
Did you ever have anything more to do with the one that ratted you out?
You know, I saw him a few times, but no relationship.
Any forgiveness?
Yeah, of course I forgive him.
I'm not one to hold grudges and I forgive, you know, and you don't forget, but you certainly forgive me.
But that was worse for you than actually going to prison.
Far worse than prison itself was waiting to go to prison.
The thought of it.
Just the uncertainty in your life.
You're almost dying in slow motion.
Once you go to prison, it becomes almost a rebirth if you're willing to take that failure, that life failure, and use it as a lesson to reinvent yourself.
And that's what I did.
You have a lot of time in prison to think about stuff.
There's nothing else to do for most of the day, right?
Yeah, so I did really two things.
Number one is I thought about stuff a lot, for sure, but I also taught myself to write.
And I used that time to perfect my writing.
So it's all not perfect, but just, you know, really become a competent writer.
And that led me to write The Wolf of Wall Street, which then launched this entirely new career.
So I think no matter, you know, the lesson for anyone listening is that, you know, everyone f ⁇ up.
Everyone makes mistakes.
Some people make much bigger mistakes than others, right?
Would you change anything?
No.
I mean, when you look at where you've got to now.
No, I wouldn't.
The whole path up and down and then back up.
Would you change it?
I wouldn't, but that, so let me, it's a complicated question.
So the answer is no, because it's not possible.
Of course, if I could not have done anything to hurt another person, of course I wish I never did that.
Of course I feel terrible about all that stuff, and I'm very remorseful for that, okay?
And I've spent so many years making up for that in countless ways.
But I wouldn't change anything because that was my life and it happened.
And I've used that as sort of like to create this life I have now.
So if I could cherry pick it and say, you know, I hope no one ever lost money as my, of course I do that.
I'm not crazy, right?
But you can't do that.
You know, you have to look back at your life and say, you know what, this is what I did.
I made mistakes.
I learned from those mistakes.
And now I keep becoming a better version of myself.
That's my goal is to become a better version of myself every day.
Are you completely squeaky clean now?
Squeaky, mean sober, clean, or clean with the law?
Anyway.
I'm the cleanest person that you'll ever meet.
You know why?
Because I would have to be.
In other words, you realize that I'm going to be scrutinized more than anybody.
And in fact, I was.
For many years, the government thought I was not paying my fine that I had.
They thought I was hiding money.
They looked at my asshole with a freaking microscope, right?
And you know what they found after five years?
Zero.
So like Warren Buffett says, yes, you could follow anybody.
If a cop follows you for 300 miles, they'll give you a speeding ticket.
They couldn't give me one.
And they followed me for hundreds of miles.
Before you went into prison, you obviously had beautiful yachts and private planes and all that kind of thing.
Which of those things do you still have?
Well, I have beautiful, I fly private often, right?
On your own plane?
No, I charter a plane, which is getting prohibitively expensive, by the way, which is terrible.
You know, that's what I love.
Trump come back and lower prices for gas would be a really good thing.
We'll come to him.
Yeah, I'm a fan, you know, not of all things, but generally speaking, big fan, right?
I would never buy a yacht again.
I was so happy when the one I had sank.
It was like the great, I was so happy.
Like, I didn't plan it out, but when it was sick, I was like, yes, Lloyd's in London, you know, right?
I wanted to Lloyd's.
My first year of my working career, to help a mate out, I worked on one of the underwriting syndicates.
So I would have been one of those guys paying you all that money for your yacht.
I got a check for like $9 million the day.
It said, a few days later, they showed me like, usually we investigate these things, but you know what?
No one would be stupid enough to go on the boat themselves into a storm.
Here's a check and don't ever ask us to insure you again, basically.
They pay me right away, right?
So Lloyd's was pretty good to me.
So no boat, but you chart a private car.
I chart a private.
Listen, I'm very...
What do you drive?
A Mercedes, Mercedes, and my wife has got an Aston Martin.
Which one?
She's got the truck, the DBX.
And I have the AMG, the GT Turbo, whatever it is, AMG, right?
I'm an Aston Martin guy.
But cars, it's interesting.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, I loved cars.
I just meant everything to me, what car I drive.
I honestly never even drive.
Now you're in comfort.
I never drive even.
Like, I'll take an Uber or something, you know, just to drive.
It's so much easier and I can just relax in the backseat.
So, you know, a lot of the urges I had of how I defined myself as a man, so to speak, very different than the way I do today.
Do you ever get urges to just go and take loads of Quelludes and behave disgracefully?
Well, yeah, but Quelludes, yeah, not cocaine, but Quelludes were amazing.
Thankfully, they're illegal and you can't find them anywhere.
Like, thank God, because they're too good, you know?
But if you have one, you know, we can go after you.
I do not, just for the record, I do not have any grellies.
That's the one drug, you know, like, and people say, listen, I'm just kidding, but a little bit.
But they remember, thank God that you can't find it.
They were just so great that, you know, very difficult to resist.
So your desires can't be quenched.
Oh, you know, again.
You probably could.
Yeah, listen, I drink a little bit here and there.
Don't use drugs.
The things that make sense in your 20s and 30s don't make sense.
It gets more difficult to recover.
When you didn't have your liberty, what was the thing you missed most about liberty?
Freedom.
Freedom.
Just literally being able to.
Were there specific things that when you when you came out, what were the things you most wanted to do again?
First thing I did was I ate a cheeseburger.
Missed cheeseburgers desperately, right?
But I mean, you know, it's very, when you're in jail, and I was not in a terrible jail.
It wasn't like I had to worry about, you know, going into the shower and getting in the shower.
It wasn't like that, okay?
It was a minimum security.
But jail's jail.
You know, you have no freedom.
You can't do what you want to do.
And there's something about that that can be very suffocating.
Now, the way I got around that was just engrossing myself and learning how to write.
And that passed the time very quickly.
And I worked out a lot, got kept in shape.
But other than that, just the entire, it's hard to explain because, you know, just something about not having freedom, not being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it, is suffocating.
And it can be very, for most people, it can break them.
You know, for me, I was able to turn that into energy to write and ended up really reinventing an entirely new life.
I've never seen an uncanny sense of what the average person needs to hear.
Yes.
He was a great president.
It's the world's number one interview show, the new global home of big debates and big questions.
This is really unfair.
Why?
We'll explain why.
For all the big names.
Donald Trump.
If you choose to have someone who's a criminal as president, I have to accept your choice.
Did you feel Elvis was a controlling influence?
But it did my six months.
I came back.
Nobody would touch me.
I put my head down and assisted at Kai Don.
And the good news, you've already found it.
All new, Piers Morgan Uncensored, right here, Monday to Thursday, 8 p.m.
I mean, it's been an amazing reincarnation.
I've watched you like at the Oxford Union and places like that, dazzling.
Which was great, by the way.
Trump as a Salesman 00:08:25
Great, yeah.
And in fact, they got you to do the sell the pen thing again.
How many times have you been asked to sell a pen?
So many times.
You hate that part.
I did it.
I did it.
Here's a pen.
In the movie, we see Jordan Belfort sell a pen.
Sell me the pen.
I'm going to meet you halfway with this, and I'll give a little sales training here about the trap of selling a pen.
Pierce, how long have you been in the market for a pen?
I've ordered a pen for three months.
So you've been looking for a pen for three months now?
Yes.
Really?
And what type of pens do you typically use when you use a pen?
I like a nice, easy-to-use ballpoint pen or something.
Okay, so now just, you know what I'm doing, so the only thing I want to teach a little bit here is that the idea is that when you sell so-and-so thing is you need to be asking questions first.
Oh, I'm not going to do it again.
But think about the pen.
Well, it wasn't really about the pen.
Nah.
You know, you would do the thing and it was a very effective stunt.
But ultimately, it's about if you're trying to sell something, don't say this is the best thing of all time.
Make sure you hone in on someone's desires to want it.
And if they have a desire to want it, you're it.
Exactly.
That's salesmanship.
Yeah.
Who is the best salesman you've ever seen?
That we would know.
Apart from you.
Apart from me?
That we would know.
That you would know.
Wow, Elon Musk is a hell of a salesman.
Yeah.
I mean, he's selling big dreams and, you know, and.
Is he a salesman so much as just a brilliant engineer?
No, he's a season.
Well, yes, he's both.
I mean, I don't think Elon Musk is necessarily.
By salesman, I think it's someone who could sell you anything, even if the actual thing he's selling is not that great.
Whereas Musk, I always think there's a high quality control on the stuff he does, right?
Whether it's the electric vehicles, whether it's SpaceX and stuff.
This is very high technology.
Many of his stuff things fail and don't work, by the way, right?
But the thing with Elon Musk is that he's able to get people believing in him in his vision for the future for sustained periods of time.
Like if you go back to the history of SpaceX, they were like this close to one failed launch from Tesla at the same time.
And the same is happening with X, and I would back him to deliver it.
I would never discount him with X, by the way, right?
So I look at him as being an amazing salesman.
And Buffett, by the way, is another world-class salesperson and communicator.
And he actually says that what changed his life was he took a course on sales and persuasion.
Yeah, back then it was Dale Carnegie, and it changed his life.
But what does he sell, really?
What did he sell?
Well, in the early days, you know what he would be without his ability to sell and persuade the most successful unknown money manager from Omaha, Nebraska.
It was his ability to get his message out there.
He was able to give him money to invest in Berkshire Hathaway.
And that made him into what he is.
The best salesman, I think, out there, for better or worse, is Donald Trump.
No doubt.
I have never seen anybody.
I've never met anyone like Trump.
And I've known him a long time, good, bad, friendly, not friendly.
You know, we fall in and out all the time.
But you cannot deny that the showmanship, the energy, the competitive streak he has, but ultimately the salesmanship.
He is able to crystallize messaging and deliver it in a way that mass numbers of people can understand, relate to, and support in a way I haven't seen in any political figure for a long time.
So I think that, yes, it's true, but he's also an amazing marketer and promoter.
Well, isn't marketing and salesmanship similar?
There are similar two sides of the same core.
Marketing is sort of like bringing someone to the next step in the process, right?
Selling is actually closing the deal.
If you look at Donald Trump, I'll tell you one thing he has that I've never seen, an uncanny sense of what the average person needs to hear.
Yes.
And it's unbelievable.
You know, very big themes, very simple themes, repeating them again and again.
That's the trick.
And he must be the most resilient person I've ever met in my entire life.
Well, I would say he's the most thin-skinned.
He'll react to everything.
And resilient.
And thick-skinned.
Yeah, exactly.
His skin is double-pronged.
The thinnest and the thickest of anything I've ever seen in my life.
It's incredible.
He soaks up stuff that would kill off any other public figure.
Time and again.
I thought when the whole thing with the whole thing with I touched.
I thought that was...
Everybody did.
I thought he was done.
And I was baffled when he didn't even apologize and I watched his numbers go up.
He never apologizes.
And actually, there's a strength in that.
I mean, I've demanded he apologize sometimes, but after his, when I see people who do apologize, it very rarely does anything but make their situation worse.
Unless they sincerely are sorry, right?
And they've done something which is clearly completely wrong.
If you were with Trump now, you'd say that what he said about that was just locker room talk.
And he would mean that.
Well, here's the thing, though, with Trump, though.
He was a great president.
Forget the Twitter post.
Okay, I get that.
You might not like his style of communication.
But look at the world as it was when he was president and look at the world today.
I mean, you know, there were no wars.
The economy was roaring.
Inflation was low.
He got killed by COVID, so to speak, and the mainstream media and this whole, I mean, he went through this whole Russian collusion nonsense, right?
But the country...
Trump's biggest problem is this.
Yes, he gets himself in the business.
His biggest problem, but that's also his greatest asset.
You know, I remember talking to him when when he was elected the first time.
And he said, my team want me to give up Twitter.
What do you think?
I went, why would you?
It just got you elected.
Right.
And all right, so I'm partly to blame for carrying on.
But actually, you know, it was that unfiltered, our show's called uncensored.
It was that unfiltered, uncensored style he had, which cut through all the normal Washington speak.
People are smarter than many politicians give them credit for.
And Trump, you can hate him a lot, but he speaks a lot of truth about these important issues that matter to the average.
Well, his gut about things like, I saw Jamie Diamond defending him.
Exactly.
And it's not because he's a massive Trump supporter.
In fact, he's financially supported Democrats far more than Republicans.
But he made the point that if you just attack all his supporters as crazy, deplorables and so on, you're missing the point of why they vote for him.
They're not voting for him because they love his tweeting or because they like his personal issues or whatever.
They're supporting him because they think his gut feel for things like not going to war, for things like the economy, the tax reforms he brought in, the reform of NATO, which they're now all paying up their dues, all that kind of stuff, you know, actually was very effective.
I think if it hadn't been for COVID, he'd have been re-elected quite comfortably.
And also there's a huge miss in the way the Republicans viewed mail-in voting.
In other words, the mail-in ballots, right?
They shunned it, said, oh, no, go down and vote in Election Day.
And the Democrats embraced it.
And, you know, you had 30 days of voting versus one day of voting on the Republican side.
So it was a huge miss in tactics as well.
But yeah, you're right.
If it wasn't for COVID, he most certainly would have been.
Can you divorce, though, some of the effectiveness of Trump, which is undeniable, with the more outrageous stuff that comes out of his mouth and the effect it has?
And the example, the classic one being the way he fired up that crowd on January the 6th.
And then we saw the result of his rhetoric actually manifesting itself in an attempt to thwart democracy at the Capitol.
I mean, you can see a link.
When you're the president of the United States, this matters.
Yeah, it does.
But, you know, Bay and I don't look at that as an insurrection.
I mean, I don't know.
What would you call it?
I'll call it a moment of idiocy.
There was no chance they were ever going to take over the Capitol, overthrow the government.
I think they were trying pretty hard.
Yeah, I don't.
I think when people try and play that down, I'm like, people died that day.
Yeah, you know, if you look back at how many times Hillary Clinton said the election was rigged, it wasn't, I mean, they both do it, right?
And yeah, he went a little bit too far for sure, but I don't look at it as democracy.
I think the country's stronger than that and the Constitution is more durable than that day.
But whatever, yes, it was wrong.
I don't agree with what he did.
I mean, if he wants to win again, would you like to see him?
What I'd like to say.
I'd like to see is no war in the Middle East.
I'd like to see no war with Russia and Ukraine.
What I'd like to see is low inflation.
What I'd like to see is my taxes go down.
I'd see the country energy independent and thriving again.
And I'd like to see the world a safer, better place for my children and grandchildren.
That's what I want to see.
I don't care about the opportunity.
I'm willing to put up with the idiotic tweets because I want the outcomes that are most important to myself, my family, and everyone I love.
Movies and Climate Change 00:07:17
If Joe Biden was working for you, would you still be employing him?
If he worked for me in his current, I put him in a nursing home.
All due respect.
I mean, come on.
I mean, I don't even really think he's president.
It's like a cutout.
It's a puppet.
And I think everyone knows that.
I mean, this is...
It is a bit embarrassing.
And it's embarrassing.
I have friends from all over the world.
They're like, what's wrong with your country?
Like, this is the president of the United States, the most powerful country in the world.
He's walking.
He's like, I mean, you know, my mom, and by sound just his age, my mom is 91 and can run intellectual circles around most 50-year-olds.
Something, he was never that sharp.
Because when I was a kid, he got thrown out of the elections because of his plagiarism, right?
A Brit.
He actually, who was the Brit that he stole the...
Yeah, that's right, he did, yeah.
So somehow he bounced back.
Good for him.
Everyone can be resilient, right?
But at this point in time, I mean, it's painfully obvious that he's not all there anymore.
He's just not.
So, you know, they should put a real candidate up there.
You know, who's running things there?
I'm not quite sure.
I suspect it's probably Obama and that whole crew still running things.
And he's just like, who's the perfect cutout?
We can just have that.
He'll do whatever we say.
And that's really what he is and why he was put up in the last election.
Has the world's biggest female movie star, Margot Robbie, thanked you yet for you propelling her career?
She did.
Really?
Big opinions.
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These people were effectively, you know, tried and convicted by the court of public opinion.
When did we stop the presumption of innocence?
Talk TV.
If you're thinking about it, we're talking about it.
Has the world's biggest female movie star, Margot Robbie, thanked you yet for you propelling her career?
She did.
Really?
Yeah, she did.
We had a really funny situation where I was in Australia with my kids was there going to school, right?
And I pulled in some random restaurant.
When was this?
This is like six years ago.
And I pulled into some random restaurant in the middle of nowhere.
And she was, we ended up in the same restaurant in the Gold Coast of Australia.
Yeah.
And we hugged and she's like, oh my God, you know, wow, what an outcome.
And she's thank you.
It was the great.
But let me tell you this, though.
You know, she is incredibly talented.
Yes.
This is no accident.
And she's very smart because she's also producing this stuff, right?
No accident.
Through her company, which is now doing gangbusters.
Yeah, I think if it wouldn't have been the wolf of Wall Street, it would have been something else.
When you saw Barbie grossing over a billion, were you like, you know what, Margot?
That's on me.
Without me, this chain of events doesn't happen.
You know, I don't really, I think she would have been a star no matter what.
I think she was destined.
Are you a Barbie fan?
No.
No.
Not because of the woke stuff.
I just didn't like the movie.
I don't like that.
I find it hard to buy.
Once they mention patriarchy for the text.
Oh, my God.
I was like, can you shut up?
But besides that, I don't like the whole, like, there's too much suspension of disbelief in me.
It's not, you know, too difficult.
Yeah, I couldn't really watch it.
I agree with that one.
I found it.
But a lot of people I know loved it.
Yeah, I can't see how.
Because a lot of women thought, great, this makes women look great.
Ken's an idiot.
I was hoping I would like it, by the way.
I wasn't hoping.
I wasn't wanting to hate it because it's Margot.
I love Margot.
I wanted to love it.
And it started off okay.
And then I was like, oh my God, this is just like awful.
And especially at the ending, but the guitar singer.
Stop it.
I'm the same.
I found it almost unwatched.
Really?
I'm like, really?
No, I think she's a brilliant actress.
I met her actually in Oscar's party.
Very charming.
Great actress.
I think she's a very talented person, not just in on-screen, but the production company she set up and everything.
It's all great, but I thought Barbie sucked.
Yeah, it was just, it was horrendous.
It was bad.
Have you seen Leah since?
Yeah, yeah.
You still see him?
Yeah, I saw him about six months ago.
Yeah.
Where?
He was in Khan Film Festival.
We ran into each other.
What happens when you see each other?
Oh, he hugged me.
He said something really nice.
He goes, you know what?
I think we made one of the last great movies.
He goes like, they can't make movies like that.
No.
He goes, I just can't.
They can't.
There will be somebody from Human Resources saying, you can't have a dwarf being thrown at a Velcro Darboard.
You know what he said also?
He goes, I never saw Marty so happy and at ease than when he was filming that movie.
Really?
He's usually much different.
He was so happy and laughing.
He goes just to watch Marty.
And I think on some level, the movie is an expression of how much Marty enjoyed himself the whole thing.
Because I find so many movies now very boring.
I get told they're brilliant.
I sit and try and watch them.
Hollywood seems to have lost that ability to just be pure entertainment.
One of the exceptions, Top Gun Maverick.
That was great.
Which was one of the great sequel to a movie I loved, but it was just pure entertainment.
I went with two of my sons in their 20s, and we were like punching the air and having a great afternoon.
I was like, that's what movie going.
I think what's wrong, a couple of things.
Number one, too much reliance on special effects and not enough on the story.
Top Gun Maverick had an amazing story.
Right?
But so much of the stuff, like, you know, I loved Avengers, then it got crazy with all, I mean, with just too much CGI and then the woke infused in.
So, yeah, I think there's a real problem right now.
And, you know, I think TV shows are much more interesting these days than movies.
I found myself watching a lot more TV streaming than movies, and hopefully it will change, you know?
Well, the pandemic changed our viewing patterns, didn't it?
It did.
And we ended up watching every single movie ever made.
And then got into box sets, which were great because they could last like three, four days.
But you know, I went to the movies to see Top Gun.
I went to the theater for the movie.
Same with me.
I went to the theater.
The last time I went to the movies was Top Gun.
Me too.
Because I wanted to see it on a big screen.
Exactly.
So if it's great, you'll go.
When you see Davos, the whole setup of Davos, what do you think of it?
I think it's like the Oscars for financial services people.
They get to congratulate.
Should it happen?
No, it doesn't.
They'll go in on their private planes and preach about climate change.
Climate change.
With some random woman from the Amazon rainforest coughing on them, right?
And I'm like, what am I watching?
It's a networking opportunity for rich people.
It's, you know, a self-congratulatory, nonsensical bunch of, right?
And it's so out of touch with the real problems of the world.
And just, you know, I know that because John Kerry went there.
So what does that say, right?
Well, he was jumped about because he uses more private planes than anybody in history.
And there is a contradiction there because I sort of think, well, the one thing we learned in the pandemic, other than to watch everything on TV and movies, was we also learned that you don't have to be with each other physically to have a meeting.
Why if you're having a meeting about things like climate change, as Kerry does, do you not just do it remotely?
Save your carbon footprint.
You can't get the statue.
Right.
Right.
You know, I crashed his wife's plane, Teresa High's.
You did?
Yeah, yeah.
I charted that plane.
I think they were married back then, yeah, and I charted it and coming back from St. Martin many years ago and St. Thomas and landed in a snowstorm in Farmingdale, Long Island, and crashed the plane.
Really?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nearly died on John Kerry's wife's plane.
Hard Work and Skills 00:02:33
Yes, true story.
That would have been a great ending for you.
I know, right?
I mean, how are you?
How do you want to end your life eventually?
I mean, obviously, you're a long way from it, but you've got to go out with a bang, haven't you?
You know, hopefully my sleep.
I always say my wife hates the fly, right?
We're in a plane, it starts to bounce it hunting.
I'm not going to die in a plane crash.
It would be way too anticlimatic at this point.
I've been through three plane crashes, a yacht sinking.
I mean, it's not going to happen like that.
So, you know, hopefully I'll die many years from now asleep in my bed with my children happy and healthy.
That's what I like.
And when you do, how do you want to be remembered?
It's the ultimate comeback story, ultimate redemption story.
Yeah.
That's it.
I mean, you know, I think, and I think I really have done a pretty good job at that.
And I think not just that I help people, you know, with this book to invest more wisely or my sales training book to sell more effectively or be a better entrepreneur.
I think also my life into itself serves as inspiration to people who are either made a mistake or are currently down on their luck or just struggling and you think that, you know, how do I come back from it?
And what's the single most effective bit of advice for people that are in that position to get them back on track?
That there's going to be typically a specialized skill that you might have to learn.
You might have to re-educate yourself to learn something new and you have to learn to write.
Exactly.
And speak and everything else.
There's hard work, but then there's doing hard work that you don't like doing.
Some hard work people, like you might like doing something, so you'll work really hard at that.
Embrace the stuff that you need to embrace that maybe you don't like doing.
You need to train yourself to do things you don't like doing to get the things that you want.
Most people skip that step.
They, you know, like you're a famous newscast, right?
Well, you know what?
How hard did you work?
How much do you train?
How much work do you do to get to that point?
To be great at interviewing people, to perfect your delivery.
There's work to be done.
If you want to change your life and you have a certain set of skills, well, guess what?
Chances are you're going to have to learn or perfect a certain skill to get the outcome you want.
Don't just try to have the plan.
Do the work, the hard work in the beginning.
And that's the first step, I think, to really changing your life.
I also think just obviously the classic never give up is important, but also everything does pass.
I mean, you've seen that in your life.
And I always say to my kids, you know, and they're from 12 to 30 now, but however bad things seem in the moment, short of death, everything is recoverable.
Wolves Always Find a Way 00:02:39
Yeah.
You can survive and thrive, whatever it is.
Do you think?
Yeah, I do.
But again, I get back because this is one missing thing that really drives it is that, you know, it's not just about hard work.
It's not never give up because if you just keep doing the same thing again and again.
It's about changing your own.
It's about something that you, you might have to change something about yourself.
Either learn a new skill, you know, build yourself emotionally, become more resilient, but you can't just be the same person and expect different results.
You have to grow yourself.
And that's the step I think most people miss is they don't invest in themselves, whether it's taking the right courses, you could do it online, you could do it in person, but literally learning things that you have to know to succeed in life.
And if you don't have those things, you'll keep getting battened around.
Maybe you'll get some mediocre results.
But the greatness lies in making yourself great.
You have to be great at something and then do the hard work and then you'll get the result you want.
So you've actually met a real wolf, right?
Yeah, with the photographer David Yarrow.
So I'll be a little bit more.
I've done many photo shoots with David in the beginning with the real wolf, ultimately with a hybrid because he was getting some flack from the animal people, right?
So now it's not full wolves, but it's hybrid.
So it's more friendly to the whatever you call the animal crisis, right?
Okay.
But incredible stuff with David.
And then recently, I was in Bali and an old friend of mine, believe it or not, he has a house.
He keeps 22 wolves.
Real wolves.
In his house.
And it's just them all.
He walks around these seven wolves.
And yeah, I met all surrounded by wolves.
And wolves are not like dogs.
You don't tell a wolf to sit.
He'll say, you know, wolves dance to their own tune, but they're also beautiful.
And they don't bite you per se, but you don't want to be around them when they're hungry.
Did you see any similarities between you and an actual wolf, character-wise?
The characters, they go in packs.
I had my pack, my wolf pack back then, right?
It wasn't just me.
I was the leader of the pack.
I was the alpha wolf.
But you always have a pack of wolves, and wolves are very intelligent.
They always find a way.
That's the thing about wolves.
They always find a way.
And they'll kill anything that gets in their way.
If it gets in their way, especially if they're hungry.
Great to see you, John.
Me too.
Let's not leave it another 12 years.
I enjoy it.
Sure.
Good to see you.
He's one of the biggest and most controversial voices in American politics.
Frankly, I don't believe in proportionate response to terrorism.
I believe that the way that you stop terrorism is with wildly disproportionate response.
I agree with him.
So my question is today: what is the going rate today for human life?
I mean, 2014 was a great year for Bencha
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