Jordan Belfort

Speaker 1 The closer you've been following your equity investments recently, the jumpier you likely are.

Speaker 1 A lot of Americans have concluded that the Wall Street game may be rigged, that the whole thing is kind of a scam, but there's still a huge amount of money tied up in it, not just in individual investing, of course, but in pension funds.

Speaker 1 The whole world world is tied up in the American stock market. So how exactly do you succeed in it as an individual?

Speaker 1 We thought the man to ask would be the man who's seen both sides of this business, legitimate and less than Jordan Belfort, the wolf of Wall Street, with a new book, The Wolf of Investing.

Speaker 1 And he joins us now to explain

Speaker 1 you can make a fortune on Wall Street.

Speaker 1 Can you make a fortune on Wall Street? You can, but it takes time.

Speaker 1 You know, I think it's, I think, listen, the mistake that people make is that the average person is that when you don't have that much money to start, let's just choose a number.

Speaker 1 Let's say just $10,000, right? It's a random number, right? You say to yourself, if I'm going to really get anywhere as an investor, I need to make a big hit.

Speaker 1 To turn that into like a million bucks, I've got to find the next Apple computer, the next crazy crypto token, whatever, some wildly successful investment, right?

Speaker 1 which leads you to engage in wild speculation, short-term trading, trying to time the market.

Speaker 1 And the truth is is the opposite you don't need to start with a lot of money to end up with a lot of money by doing the exact opposite which is holding for the long term and in all the highest quality stocks and in relying on long-term compounding and reinvesting dividends and making small contributions along the way but forgetting like you said the noise and people are worried about their equities this is the problem because as soon as you start buying into that like you know what i think the market might be going down or maybe it's going to go up next year and you just have to time that by buying and selling you create taxable events and also human beings by our nature we're kind of crappy stock pickers and when you try to pick individual stocks you tend to lose most of the time okay so what here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna give you my investment strategy okay and I'm gonna be as honest as I can be and you assess it based on your expertise and tell me if I'm right or wrong okay so I'll get out of my rec room big screen TV with my dab pen and my laptop and I'll turn on Jim Kramer on CNBC and when he tells me to buy I buy and if he says sell I sell yeah You're getting financially whipsawed.

Speaker 1 So I think I quit. Is that working for me? No, it's not going to work.
So I kind of buried Kramer in the book. I guess I'm not going on CNBC anytime soon for any internet.

Speaker 1 Why would you bury Jim Kramer? I mean, this is a guy with an uninterrupted string of correct calls. Buy

Speaker 1 K.P. Morgan of this generation.
Sam Bankman Frieds FTX. Listen,

Speaker 1 the best thing was an interrupted string of terrible calls. Oh, listen, he's had a lot of good calls because he's on both sides of the market.

Speaker 1 He tells you you to buy one thing on Monday and sell it on Wednesday and back, and vice versa.

Speaker 1 This guy literally is telling you, they actually did a study on this when they put up his recommendations. What he said on Monday and then a Friday, the exact opposite.

Speaker 1 Like one day he's saying the market's going up, next day it's going down, buy this, go from this sector to that sector.

Speaker 1 That is historically, mathematically, scientifically proven to be the worst possible way to invest your money.

Speaker 1 They've gone back 100 years, the scientific, the academic studies, and the analysts can't pick the right stocks.

Speaker 1 The hedge fund managers and the mutual fund managers can't beat the SP 500, which is the overall broader market. And there's a reason for that because all the information is out there.

Speaker 1 So unless you have inside information, which is illegal, right?

Speaker 1 And certainly the average person is not going to have that, or some other way to beat the market, whether it's high-frequency trading with computers that are lightning fast.

Speaker 1 So some of the big firms, they'll time the market like a millionth of a second better than an average investor. They get an edge.
But for everyone else, you can't beat the market.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work, especially when you deduct all the fees, the commissions, and also the taxes from short-term trading. So let's say a hedge fund returns 15% one year.

Speaker 1 Say, well, that's pretty good, right? But after they take their 2% manager's fee, 20% performance bonus, right? Suddenly, it's not even beating the SP 500. And that's a good year.

Speaker 1 Most of the time, they don't even beat it without their fees. So why would anyone hand money to a hedge fund?

Speaker 1 So Warren Buffett asked this exact question back in 2007, made a big announcement, bet a million bucks that I don't care what other hedge fund you are, you can't beat the S ⁇ P for 100 over 10 years.

Speaker 1 And at first, no one took the bet. Eventually, someone did with what's called a fund of funds.
It was a hundred different funds, right? And after year seven, they threw in the towel.

Speaker 1 They couldn't even come close to the S ⁇ P. And that was without all their fees.
And just so you know, the fees they take, so it's 20% typically is a performance bonus, right?

Speaker 1 If the fund makes money. Off the upside.
On the upside.

Speaker 1 But if the fund loses money the following year, they don't get any of the losses so it's heads they win tails you lose right the mutual fund industry is equally bad so they're engaging in you know basically asset gathering because what they do is they try to gather as many assets as possible money right because they get their management fees but the returns on the average mutual fund are dismal they don't keep up with the SP 500 which is America's 500 biggest baddest most profitable companies so and that those 500 companies change so not, this, the SMV this year is not the same as it was last year.

Speaker 1 So what happens when you buy that index as the centerpiece of your investments, right, and just hold it, you're always having the 500 top high-performing companies in your portfolio.

Speaker 1 It's very tax efficient. Now, it's boring, but it compounds at about 11% a year.
And guess what?

Speaker 1 If you invest $10,000, right, and just compounds at 11% a year, you put a little extra money in whoever you can each month, each quarter, right?

Speaker 1 Over 30 years, 40 years, it turns into millions of dollars. But I'm still caught up in the hedge fund idea.

Speaker 1 So Steve Cohen, Ray Dalio,

Speaker 1 all these guys are billionaires. Right.
So the world's biggest art collection. So how did they get so rich if it doesn't work?

Speaker 1 Well, for a time, it was like the, you know, everyone thought, oh my God, they're so great, the hedge fund.

Speaker 1 So for many in the 90s and 2000s, like this, the word was really like this mystique that you had these really high-performing hedge funds. And there were a few.

Speaker 1 There were a few people that actually can beat the market. Ray Dalio is one who's done it consistently.
He's not taking your money. The average,

Speaker 1 when they're really that good, they don't take an average investor's money. They train their own money in a few very, very large institutions.
So those funds are not open to the average investor.

Speaker 1 But then all the other hedge funds, which kind of suck, right? They're bathing in the afterglow of the aura of the hedge fund manager. We see like on billions, right? See, this mystical hedge fund.

Speaker 1 Well, guess what? Most of these guys suck, all right? They're not beating the SB. They're just not.
It's historically proven. They don't beat the S ⁇ P.

Speaker 1 And they take these massive fees when they do win one year. And they always get that 2% matching.
So watch what happens. Let's say you're managing a billion dollars.

Speaker 1 So before you even start, it's 20 million a year you're getting just

Speaker 1 before the fun even starts plus 20% of all the profits. And when you take those and how about this, I'll go one step further.
And also, when you have a hedge fund, you have to show activity.

Speaker 1 Because unless you're, you can't just buy the S ⁇ P and hold it. Someone will say, well, why would I give you my money? You're not doing anything.

Speaker 1 So they almost have to show activity to justify their existence, which makes them engage in short-term trading. And human beings are just terrible market timers.

Speaker 1 And this is just over, it's proven over 100 plus years of studies that you cannot trade in and out of the stock market, buying, selling, selling, buying sector, this sector one day.

Speaker 1 So it's just a trap. The way I look at it is this.
So Wall Street creates massive value. They do.
Wall Street's necessary.

Speaker 1 You can hate Wall Street, despise them for what things they do wrong, but Wall Street is necessary. They create massive value for the economy.
They take companies public, right?

Speaker 1 They finance the growth of America. It's needed.
They maintain the debt markets, the credit markets. That's the useful side of Wall Street, where they create massive value.

Speaker 1 Then there's the not so useful, the dark side of Wall Street, where they create bubble after bubble after bubble, where they have instruments of financial mass destruction they create for just gambling purposes, where they churn you, they have excess commissions and fees, and rob the public blind.

Speaker 1 So the question right in the book was you know how does the average person get the maximum exposure to the good side of Wall Street which is the great companies they take public and finance that become huge multinational so how do you maximize that but avoid the corruption or the churning and the burning and the you know financial bubbles and so forth try to and and play into what I call the Wall Street theme machine complex which is this advertising monolith where basically they convince you like people like Kramer to play the suckers game where they're actively if you go on CNBC they're all day long trying to convince people to play the short-term trading game, which is indeed a sucker's game.

Speaker 1 So you go into a casino, right? We spoke about Terry Packer, right? Because gambling, right? So they own casinos, the Packer family, right?

Speaker 1 So in a casino, you go in there knowing that the odds are against you by what, 5%,

Speaker 1 depending on what game you play. So the odds are against you and the house will win over time, right? That's a legit casino.
The odds are against you.

Speaker 1 But what if you go into a corrupt casino where they have loaded dice and they're dealing from the bottom of the deck? That's Wall Street.

Speaker 1 So now not only are the odds against you, because it's hard to pick winning stocks, but there's people who have information that's more timely than you. They're trading ahead of you.

Speaker 1 They are charging excess fees. And also all these publications and chatting in the news with CNBC, Bloomberg isn't as bad, right? Because they cater mostly to professionals.

Speaker 1 But still, trying to convince people that you could somehow figure out when you should buy oil and then sell your meta and then somehow go into a steel stock and then go into overseas. It's insane.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work. And people get financially whipsawed.
And I saw it myself, my own family member, very successful guy. I start my book off telling his story.
That's your brother-in-law.

Speaker 1 Yeah, brother-like, he's a very smart guy. And

Speaker 1 I watched this portfolio get decimated through short-term trading and using margin and all the things that they... Was he doing it himself?

Speaker 1 He was trying to do it himself and, you know, following tips he heard on TV or online. And it's just, it is so simple.
What happened to him? Well, thankfully, he's successful. He lost a lot of money.

Speaker 1 And then he learned his lesson. And I showed him what to do the the right way, and he now is building a proper portfolio for the long term.
So I think the distinction is this.

Speaker 1 You can get rich in the stock market, but not overnight. It's just, it doesn't work.
You can't do that.

Speaker 1 And if you try to get rich by engaging in short-term trading or picking like one stock, you're probably going to end up in the financial poorhouse.

Speaker 1 So the solution I put in this book, which is ironic where I came from, right? Because I committed fraud 30 years ago, right? So as you said, I've seen both sides, right?

Speaker 1 So the solution in the book is, is really very simple to build a world-class portfolio and secure your future. Because I don't think you can rely on Social Security these days.

Speaker 1 You don't have to pay for your diapers when you're in a nursing home by the time you get it, right?

Speaker 1 So this is about, you know, empowering yourself financially, and it's about doing less versus more, not hiring experts.

Speaker 1 Less trading yourself. Less trade.
It's about investing as opposed to speculating. Now, there's nothing wrong with speculating.
It's fun, right?

Speaker 1 And if you want to take 5% of your capital and speculate and buy and sell it, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that.
Now I encourage people to do that because it's good.

Speaker 1 You can have fun with that. Maybe you'll make some money.
But that's not how you secure your retirement. If you want to secure a great retirement, you start off young as possible, right?

Speaker 1 And it's never too late, by the way. And it doesn't matter how much money you have.
You can start with a little bit of money. You don't need a lot.

Speaker 1 But the key is making little, small, regular contributions and not worrying. So an index fund? Is that what you're saying? Well, the main one is an index fund.

Speaker 1 You want to have an index fund, S ⁇ P, low-cost S ⁇ P 500 index fund, and you want to have it in certain types of accounts that are tax deferred whenever possible and so forth, right?

Speaker 1 Then you also want to balance that out with some, you need to have some bonds in there, a small amount depending on your age, right? And on top of that, some cash for an emergency.

Speaker 1 And then if you want to speculate, you can have, let's say, 5% for speculation. But the key is this.
Don't hire... an expert.
For example, we've been conditioned. This is the trap, right?

Speaker 1 So you're a homeowner, right? So if your pipes in your house burst, you probably do a lot better off calling a plumber to fix your pipes than trying to fix them yourself, right? Right. Right.

Speaker 1 Fair enough, right? If you have electric short, I suggest you call an electrician versus trying to go put on rubber gloves and not get electrocuted.

Speaker 1 You'll get a much better result with the expert in that too. If you're sick, let's say your appendix is about to burst, right?

Speaker 1 Don't do your own surgery, have your wife cut you open. Go to a doctor.
that's an expert at doing surgery. Let him do the surgery.
Fair. Fair enough, right?

Speaker 1 That's true for almost all things in life, except Wall Street. It's the one exception to the otherwise pretty much steadfast rule about seeking out experts to help you get the best result.

Speaker 1 On Wall Street, they don't get you a better result than doing it yourself.

Speaker 1 They get you a worse result because of all the fees, the commissions, the performance bonuses, and also they can't out guess the market. The market is too hard to beat.

Speaker 1 Now, again, there's a few people that can do it. They're not taking your money.
How, okay, I want to focus on them for a second because undoubtedly they're the touts.

Speaker 1 They're the people who convinced the rest of us that this works because they're so rich.

Speaker 1 How did those people get rich?

Speaker 1 So if you look, a guy like, you know, for example, like a Ray Dahlia, who's been there, he got in very early into the game, right? And he's an incredibly brilliant guy. He's a great stock picker.

Speaker 1 And whatever his proprietary method is, or a Warren Buffett, right? You know, there's a few people out there.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the great studies was from an economist named Paul Samuelson, right, in the 70s. And this is really what started the shift into index funds.

Speaker 1 He did a study that went back 100 years, all the way to the earliest days of record keeping, right?

Speaker 1 He studied every mutual fund out there since the 1920s, all the stock recommendations since the 1890s, right?

Speaker 1 And he came to the conclusion, he goes, okay, maybe there were a few people who can outperform the S ⁇ P, but they remain remarkably well hidden. He couldn't find any.

Speaker 1 Couldn't find, this is like a top, he won a Nobel Prize to the guy for this, right? So that was really the beginning. That was like the shot across the bow.

Speaker 1 Now, Wall Street did everything they could to suppress this. So the first guy to try this was Jack Bogle from Vanguard.
You know, Vanguard, right?

Speaker 1 So Vanguard is a place, a great, great place where you can buy the best index funds with virtually no expenses. So I strongly recommend Vanguard, right?

Speaker 1 And there's a few others as well, but Jack Bogle was the first, right?

Speaker 1 But when he started Vanguard, Wall Street went out on the ultimate smear campaign for like a decade suppressing everything about index funds, saying it's the stupidest thing. Who wants to be average?

Speaker 1 Dreyfus, which is is a huge mutual company, said no fees, no way. Like, actually,

Speaker 1 in the Wall Street chart of full page, it's like, if you don't, like,

Speaker 1 that was marketed to the people who were the gatekeepers, to investors. So if they're not, because Vanguard doesn't pay fees, right?

Speaker 1 So if they won't pay you fees, don't put your clients in their funds. Instead, put them in our high-commission funds.
We'll pay you a lot of money.

Speaker 1 So for many, many years, Vanguard languished and was suppressed, right? It finally got traction after the crash in 87.

Speaker 1 For the first time, all of a sudden, you know, the mirage evaporated when everyone lost a lot of money. And for the first time, Vanguard started to get a fair shake in the market.

Speaker 1 And then slowly but surely, they started to grow and grow.

Speaker 1 And then as the internet came about and the high-speed connections and platforms for direct communications with customers, it suddenly became a mass exodus out of these sort of high-expense mutual funds, right?

Speaker 1 Which I think that Bogle saved the public probably a few hundred billion by now in fees. Mutual funds were ripping people's eyeballs out forever.
Now they still do crappy.

Speaker 1 Their performance is crappy compared to the S ⁇ P 500, but for years and years, they're just ripping the public's eyeballs. That was the most lucrative industry out there.

Speaker 1 And Wall Street just spent countless hundreds of millions on advertising campaigns and whatnot, right, to make people think this is the way to go.

Speaker 1 So your Merrill Lynch is bullish on America's commercials, bullish on America, right? Although, you know,

Speaker 1 T-Row Price, and I don't want to point the finger at any one of them, right?

Speaker 1 But now they all offer this ultra low-cost index options, options, which historically has outperformed people trying to pick individual stocks forever.

Speaker 1 It's just, it outperforms people because people are really crappy at picking stocks. And also, you know, there's another part to it as well, right? Just trying to time the market.

Speaker 1 It plays into all our worst impulses. So like you said, right now people are scared, right? And rightfully so.
The world seems to be on fire.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I watch your podcast all the time and it scares me sometimes.

Speaker 1 It's a scary world, right? So you would think that, okay, the U.S. economy is laden with debt, right? Which is true, right? It's got fundamental problems.
China's going to take over the world, right?

Speaker 1 Well, when I was, you know,

Speaker 1 just getting started, it was Japan taking over the world, which turned to be a fallacy, and they had their own problems.

Speaker 1 So I don't know whether China is going to take over the world, be the biggest economy. It's going to surpass the United States.

Speaker 1 I don't know if the stock market's going to go up, down, sideways, or around circles for the next five years. I mean, how do you, you don't know? Anyone who tells you they know that is lying to you.

Speaker 1 So to sit there and try to watch the news and trade against like what's happening in the economy and what's happening in the world is a fool's errand.

Speaker 1 You're not gonna succeed like that unless you're one of these rare individuals who's full-time as a unique gift.

Speaker 1 But then again though, look at all these massive companies that have been created in the last 20 years, like Google, Meta, right? This is a huge company, not NVIDIA with artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1 So how do you get exposure to all that without having to pick the winners from the losers? The answer is very simple.

Speaker 1 You buy them all in one investment, which is the S ⁇ P 500, and then you sit back and let time do the heavy lifting for you. So you don't have to watch Jim Kramer at all.

Speaker 1 If you watch Jim Kramer for entertainment, like you like that kind of bloviating humor, good for you, right? I personally don't like it.

Speaker 1 The worst, even worse than that is if you watch Jim Kramer and you happen to opt in, like if you have to answer one of the emails on the website, they'll start barraging you with emails.

Speaker 1 I did this as an experiment. Like I was like, you know, a guy that injects stuff with the virus to see how sick you get, right?

Speaker 1 I actually opted into Kramer's, you know, little thing online, and I started receiving a barrage of like 100 emails about join his special club who will alert you to what stocks are going up and down in real time.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's like, this is insanity, but this is a major network, right? That's, you know, giving investors crappy advice. Now, on the flip side, here's the weird part.

Speaker 1 They also have good stuff on that network, like there's legitimate news. And that's the problem.

Speaker 1 So they mix in legitimate news, great reporting interviews with great CEOs and you learn about the economy what's going on in the world but they intersperse that with like this market giving advice and it's not it's nonsense you you you people can't beat the market and I saw it play out my brother-in-law many of my friends back in when the bubble burst in 2008 and even worse by the way in 2000 with the dot-com bust right so every time the market busts out all the bullshit gets exposed.

Speaker 1 Of course. And all of a sudden people thought they were expert day traders or expert market timers.
They were like basking in the glow of just an up market.

Speaker 1 Like I say in the book, a rising tide lifts all ships, right? And a falling tide, well, it lowers all ships, right?

Speaker 1 So you see the truth come out, as Warren Buffett says, you know, until the tide goes out, you don't know who

Speaker 1 has no clothes on, who's swimming naked, right? So you said at the outset that there are people who do succeed in the market

Speaker 1 because they have inside information. Right.
It feels like there's a lot of that. There is.
Yeah. How does that work? So I think there's different levels of it, right?

Speaker 1 There's like the full-on criminal stuff like you saw in the movie Wall Street with Gordon Gecko, right?

Speaker 1 Where like people are actually paying people in moles and stuff like that to get information that's not public, paying off directors, having inside links to the company or law firms that are doing deals, right?

Speaker 1 That happens for sure. And people do get in trouble from time to time and go to jail, right?

Speaker 1 Martha Stewart. No, exactly, right? But she was like kind of a fall person.

Speaker 1 She sure was.

Speaker 1 people did a lot worse than Martha Stewart, right?

Speaker 1 Why did they put her away? You know, it's hard to say because she's famous and she's a big target.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it kind of sucks when you're famous in a big target and they want to come get you, right? Especially if some of your views aren't that popular. They want to come after you, right?

Speaker 1 So, but that's sort of the cliched type of insider trading, where they're just literally buying and getting moles, and that's highly illegal.

Speaker 1 Then there's the softer side of it, which is where these big hedge funds have these like analytical firms that are getting like research that's inside research.

Speaker 1 So, like, for example, they're like, I had a friend who was a very big short seller, right?

Speaker 1 And he actually had people waiting outside of a warehouse, counting the number of trucks that were leaving the warehouse to try to like, you get it to see how are they really shipping the amount of goods.

Speaker 1 They're doing this deep type of research, which sometimes crosses over into inside information. So what is the line? I mean, you're allowed to be informed.

Speaker 1 You're allowed to be informed, but theoretically, you should not be in possession of information that is non-public.

Speaker 1 Everyone's supposed to have access to the same information at the same time to make a fair market, right?

Speaker 1 And generally speaking, it's true for everybody, all all the average investors, but there are certainly people on Wall Street.

Speaker 1 I mean, you'd be naive to think that, you know, an analyst in a special relationship that's doing the investment banking deal.

Speaker 1 So if someone raises, you know, $500 million for a company, you tell me the CEO and the owner of that firm are not like having little conversations, little inklings here and there.

Speaker 1 So I'm sure that's happening. That's much more difficult to prove.
So it's a lot of it is buried under like, you know, guidance and financial reports. So they'll issue an analyst report, right?

Speaker 1 And, you know, the analyst report will give sort of plausible deniability for why they think a stock is going up or down, right?

Speaker 1 But even then, I mean, I think that's difficult to prove, which is why you don't hear a lot of those cases. No, the SEC doesn't seem to bring many.

Speaker 1 Well, the SEI, the whole history of GC in the book, the SEC is a ridiculous organization. So it was conceived, listen, the first chairman

Speaker 1 was Jack Kennedy.

Speaker 1 Joe Kennedy,

Speaker 1 the original Wolf of Wall Street, right? So like, you know, the bootlegger. Yeah, from the beginning, it was set up with a two-tiered system where the big firms basically were protected, right?

Speaker 1 And when they got in trouble, they did something so egregious that it was undeniably egregious, they'd pay a small fine and move on, right? Which is why Goldman Sachs, for example, right?

Speaker 1 Now, Goldman Sachs serves a vital function to the U.S. economy, and they're also behind every great crime or the biggest crimes that are out there, including my movie.

Speaker 1 That was, you know, The Wolf of Walsh. It was financed by these Malaysians, right? The one NDB fund, that scandal.
That was just coincidentally. And who was the banker that paved the way for that?

Speaker 1 Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 1 Out of there, I think it was in Malaysia or Singapore office. They They had a banker there that provided the funding and got double or triple the normal fees for doing it.

Speaker 1 And that money got siphoned off. That's classic Wall Street.
So on one hand, they create massive value. On the other hand, they rape and pillage the village.

Speaker 1 And it's the average investor and the average person that bears the brunt of that. The bailouts and subpar returns.

Speaker 1 Well, just to follow up on the Wall Street investment firm, I mean, information firms, research. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 everyone uses those, correct? Right. Hedge funds are very much using them.
So they're not in trouble, though.

Speaker 1 In some cases, they pay employees or former employees of companies to talk about what's happening inside the company. Right.
That's very common. Yes.
So that's the lobbyist.

Speaker 1 So how is that not insider trading? I've always wondered.

Speaker 1 Well, again, it's not, if someone gives you an overall sense of what's going on, that's like nothing that's not out in the public domain, but it's sort of like an insider's perspective versus information on like, are sales going down?

Speaker 1 Is there a problem with manufacturing? It's not public, right? So that's when it crosses over the line. And it's a gray area, right?

Speaker 1 But it's very common in hedge funds to use these research firms that go out there and get non-public information. And there's a very fine line, like a drug trial.

Speaker 1 If there's a drug trial going on, like, you know, how do you know how the drug trial is performing?

Speaker 1 Well, if you imagine calling up all the people, interviewing people that are in the drug trial and trying to figure out yourself, or people are intimately involved with administering the placebo studies or double-blind studies, They're all over that stuff.

Speaker 1 It appears that members of Congress consistently beat the S ⁇ P 500 in their personal investment. Nancy Pelosi.

Speaker 1 And a lot of others, right? And Pelosi, especially. She's the famous one.
Yeah. So how does that is Nancy Pelosi, do you think, a stock picking genius?

Speaker 1 No, she has to be operating on information that's non-public.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't that make her a criminal? Yeah, but you know,

Speaker 1 look at Joe Biden right now. I mean, look what's going on right now.
Like, listen, what I'm doing. Do you think he's a good stock picker? Joe Biden? I think he's great at laundering money, though.

Speaker 1 I mean, honestly. Apparently, from what I've seen right now, I don't get it.
Just imagine if it was Trump who was president.

Speaker 1 Every single day in the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every publication would be like $40,000 check for $20,000 check from his brother.

Speaker 1 It'd be game over, cries for impeachment. Oh, yeah.
It'd be like the world falling down. He's in China's pocket.

Speaker 1 But it's like we're living in an alternative universe right now where people in power, especially

Speaker 1 on the left, right, can operate almost with impunity. And Pelosi is a perfect example.

Speaker 1 She's not the only one, but it's inconceivable that someone could have that high a return on the market when everyone else can't do it. So what's the edge? The edge is she knows key legislation.

Speaker 1 And also, you know, maybe someone's whispering in her ear, okay, because they want to be on her good side, right? So

Speaker 1 it's hard to prove that. So but it's just prima facet.
So if what you're saying is true, and that is that the most sophisticated people in the world can't beat the S ⁇ P average,

Speaker 1 then any member of Congress, and I think they are on average dumber than the population. Especially the career politician.
For sure.

Speaker 1 There's no possibility they could do that with that inside information. No, it's not possible.
But again, so how do you go proving that, right? They have to issue subpoenas.

Speaker 1 And listen, I think that in this case, the solution is they shouldn't be allowed to trade these people. Yes.
They should not be allowed to trade. It's insane that they're allowed to.

Speaker 1 And, you know, as you said, it's private facet, right?

Speaker 1 You know, if if it looks like shit smells like shit well guess what yeah it's shit and that's you know or is bullshit in this case right so listen she's done incredibly well in a area where like the most professional investors struggle to even match the index so somehow she's doing three times as well i don't know why is no one ever taken that seriously i mean this is like a feature of internet memes, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, don't we have an SEC to look into that?

Speaker 1 SEC is not going to look into that sort of stuff because they don't want to make an enemy because they're funded. Who funds them? You know, they're funded by Congress.

Speaker 1 The budget's tied to Congress, right? There's a committee that's the Financial Services Committee, right? So that funds the SEC. But how does it make you feel?

Speaker 1 I mean, you got in a lot of trouble for fraud. But I deserved it.

Speaker 1 Right, but so do they. Yeah, I know.
But like, I never, one thing, listen, I admit that after 2008, I got a little bit bitter. I was like, you know what?

Speaker 1 These people have bankrupted the world economy. Yeah.
And no one went to jail, basically. Someone Schnook in Germany went to jail.
Exactly. So I was a little, I said, you know what?

Speaker 1 That's not really fair.

Speaker 1 but you know I don't think it's you know an empowering way to live to say just because you know I went to jail other people should go to I think jail is a terrible place right and you know I did my time and and I made the best I wrote my first book in jail right which has turned to be a great thing but you know I learned from that but I don't then wish it on how did you I mean a lot of people go to jail few write books how did you how did you do that?

Speaker 1 It's a great story. So believe it or not, when I go to jail, right? How old are you?

Speaker 1 I was 41 years old, 42.

Speaker 1 It's a terrible time to go to jail, right? I lost everything, right?

Speaker 1 And I did

Speaker 1 my two kids at the time, yeah, which was breaking the news to them was the most heartbreaking thing ever. I mean, like, literally, it was like too much crying.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, I still get emotional about it, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I had to tell them, like, you know, daddy made mistakes, and now he's in the hysterical. They were 11 and 9 at the time, right?

Speaker 1 So I go to jail, and it's not the worst jail in the world. I'm not worried about slipping in the shower.
So it's like a minimum security, but jail sucks, right? Who's my bunkmate?

Speaker 1 Tommy Chang from Chee Chin Chang. What was he doing there? So he's there for selling, not marijuana, but bongs.
Bongs. It was the most ridiculous thing ever.

Speaker 1 So he's doing a year in a day, a year and a day, for selling bongs. I'm like, shit.
I'm like, he's doing a year and a day for bongs. I should probably get 3,000 years wide.

Speaker 1 How long are you serving? 22 months. Yeah.
Right? So he's there for a year and a day. And, you know, the first few days, you know, there's not much to see.
You just tell each other stories.

Speaker 1 And I'm telling him stories about my life, the insanity. Did you know who he was? Of course, yeah, they put us together.

Speaker 1 We shared a cell, yeah, because I think we were both high profile. So they just put us together, right? So they could watch us both at once, right?

Speaker 1 So in jail, as in normal life, all the famous people know each other. Basically, right? So, and he's a great guy.
And he was writing a book at the time. And I'm telling him stories.

Speaker 1 And he's just rolling, he's just laughing hysterically every night, right? And the third night, he's like, you know, I thought you were making this shit up, but my wife Googled you.

Speaker 1 And it's like all true. In fact, your sister

Speaker 1 knows you from the top of her father from back in the day. He was a friend of mine, right?

Speaker 1 He's like, this is, you actually sank the boat, you crashed these cars, you did all this insane, you made all this money and all these drugs. He goes, you have to write a book.
And I'm like, really?

Speaker 1 You think my life's exciting? Like, because it's your life. No matter how crazy your life is, it's yours.
You don't

Speaker 1 think it's just normal. I'm like, he's like, I'm Tommy Chong.
I think your life is just insane. He goes, write a book.
So I started trying to write. And I was a terrible writer, terrible.

Speaker 1 I couldn't write anything. I'd never written before like that, you know? So after like a month, I'm like, oh, this is just not working.

Speaker 1 I go to the prison library, and I stumble upon a book called Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Of course.
I pick up this book, and I'm like, oh my God, I want to write like this.

Speaker 1 So I plowed through the book, and then I started with a yellow highlight, and I used this book like a textbook, and I taught myself to write by modeling Tom Wolfe.

Speaker 1 So it's like I had a model now, and I spent about three months just every, I mean, every metaphor, how he used grammar, how he described locations, locations, how he used conflict.

Speaker 1 And I really started to see my writing dramatically improve. So I wrote about 100 pages when I was in jail, and then I ripped them up.
I didn't think they were good enough.

Speaker 1 I got out of jail with no pages, but I had a skill now, right? So when I got out, I was like, you know, I don't know what to do with my life.

Speaker 1 And I was like, maybe I'll just start trying to write again, right? So I wrote about 12 pages, and I'm like, wow, I think those are really good. Like, I thought they were pretty good.

Speaker 1 And I hate my own writing always, right? It's like when you write, it's very, like, you always hate what you write, right? So I'm like, I think these are pretty good.

Speaker 1 I sent them to a few friends and they're like laughing, like, oh my gosh, the funny. I'm like, really? So I sent it to a book agent I knew very casually, just a casual friend, right?

Speaker 1 So I call him and say, I want to, you know, write a book. He goes, oh, great, let's get you a ghostwriter.
I said, well, I want to write myself. He goes, can you write?

Speaker 1 I'm like, I'll send you the pages. I sent him 12 pages.
Next day he calls me back. He goes, did you pay Tom Wolfe to write those pages?

Speaker 1 It was like that close to Tom Wolfe's voice, my first draft, right? I'm like, no, no, I wrote it myself. He's like, it's really good.
He goes, like, write 10 more pages. So I said, all right.

Speaker 1 So it took about, took me a week to write 10 more pages. I wrote another 10 pages.
I sent him the pages. 15 minutes later, he calls, he goes, stop everything you're doing.

Speaker 1 You have no idea what's about to happen to your life. This book is going to be a masterhead.
Masterhead, I'm going to get a movie made about this. We're going to get Leo DiCaprio to play you, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, right from the start, right? I was like, I thought he was delusional, right? But I didn't have much going on back then, right? So I was like, screw it.

Speaker 1 So I, you hold up, and literally I had a little tiny apartment and I spent one year just like doing 18 hours a day writing the book, The Wolf of Wall Street, right?

Speaker 1 About on page 60, he took it down to a random house who bought the book. I got a nice advance so I could at least live, right?

Speaker 1 And then when the book was finished, about a year later, it went through seven edits because I overwrote it, got it from a thousand pages down to 500 pages.

Speaker 1 And then when it was still a manuscript, it became a bidding war between Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio. Yeah, it wasn't even a bookkeeping.

Speaker 1 I know, it's crazy, right? And then, you know, Leo brought in Scorsese, and I always love Leo, so I sold to Leo and Scorsese after a nice nice bidding war.

Speaker 1 And so began the story of the Wolf of Wall Street, what happened with the movie. And then there was a delay, by the way, for five years, because that was 2007.

Speaker 1 And then the writer's strike hit, and it got delayed, which ended up being a great thing. And this is really empowering for all the listeners.
I'll tell you why. Because when they wrote

Speaker 1 when the script was done, by a guy named Terry Winter, who adopted the book, he did an incredible job. The first draft of the script was amazing, right?

Speaker 1 But it ended with me in jail, because I went to jail and got out, right? And that was the ending of the movie, of the script, right? There was this delay then for four years after the writer's strike.

Speaker 1 And during those four years, I got very wealthy again going out there and speaking and training entrepreneurs and teaching sales, right?

Speaker 1 So finally, four years later, when Leo Corbin goes, we're ready to go and came back to my new house. I was living in a mansion on the war.
He's like, what the hell happened to you? Like in four years.

Speaker 1 I was in a tiny apartment, now into a very nice house again. And like, oh, I'm going to do this stuff around the world.
And I showed him my clips from live on stage.

Speaker 1 And he's like, wait till Marty sees this. He's going to go crazy.

Speaker 1 They rewrote the third act of the movie and made it a comeback story so that's yes i kind of rewrote my life story when were you happier at the peak of your success pre-conviction or on the comeback comeback i was never happy before why number one i was a massive drug addiction yeah like i'm literally massive drug addiction what were you using qualudes and cocaine qualudes quales yeah was this the 70s 70s you know i i where'd you get qualudes i'll tell you how so we when i got really wealthy you know they made them illegal illegal in the United States.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right? A long time ago.

Speaker 1 But in Switzerland and Italy and Spain, we were going country to country and like buying out the pharmacies of all the loots from overseas and bringing them back into the United States, just not to sell them, just to take them, just to eat them all.

Speaker 1 So we weren't dealing with them, just consuming massive quantities of these qualities, right? And I got so wildly addicted. And that was taking me about 10, 12 a day.
Get very addicted. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And like one of them would knock out a 200-pound navy seal for eight hours. I would take four and walk around.

Speaker 1 So what was the appeal of that? You know,

Speaker 1 euphoria, the incredibly euphoric. They get this like the first is you get this tingle phase, and then you get like the slurs and the happy drool.
Then you get to the drool phase.

Speaker 1 And anyway, it's incredibly euphoric. And then I said, well, what did the drool phase look?

Speaker 1 The drool phase is when you're like drooling as you're talking, but you're like, well, drooling's not a big deal. Baby's drool.
I drool, you know?

Speaker 1 And when you're slurring, you're like, baby's slur, I slurry. There's always a justification.
But then the problem is, is the fourth phase is unconscious. Baby's

Speaker 1 That's great. That's the best justification.
But phase four, though, is unconsciousness, which is a problem. So what do you do then?

Speaker 1 Well, a responsible drug act will then take cocaine to make sure you don't go into course, right? So I started to balance it out. The yin and the yang, come on.
Cocaine, which is great, works great.

Speaker 1 The problem is cocaine makes you anxious. So I needed Xanax to get rid of the anxiety, right?

Speaker 1 So I would take Xanax to quell the anxiety, but then I still needed something to kick me over the edge with sleeping. So I took some ambient to sleep and then some morphine for the pain I had.

Speaker 1 And before I knew it, I I was taking 22 drugs at the same time. I was like a human Petri dish, right? And I was just incredibly high all the time

Speaker 1 and running off. I know.
I'm very lucky. I know.
I don't, you know, I always wonder why I didn't have any permanent damage. Yeah.
Right? I think most of us, I was not a big drinker.

Speaker 1 I think alcohol is like that wild card. Alcohol and Quails will kill you.
Yeah, it's a wild card. It's like gasoline on the fire.
So

Speaker 1 I was very fortunate. I got sober in 97.
How? Went to rehab. I went to rehab.
I got sober. What's withdrawal like from Quillins? Not bad.
It wasn't that bad.

Speaker 1 You know, for me, it wasn't so much withdrawal was the problem. It was more like just, I needed like an adult time.

Speaker 1 I was so done with it. Like, I think, you know, people can get sober in rehab.
People can get sober in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, right?

Speaker 1 You can get sober anywhere, but you have to be ready to get sober.

Speaker 1 If you're not ready, right? You could be in the world's greatest rehab and you'll just relapse. You'll run it.
You'll climb over the wall. As soon as you got, you'll use again.

Speaker 1 I was done.

Speaker 1 My life was so out of control.

Speaker 1 i had my kids both starting to get older now they're four and five years old so i was like i gotta end this so i know i was very happy to stop using drugs right so that was in 97

Speaker 1 i had a problem in 2009 where i had like i had some terrible run of like five surgeries in this shoulder and five sold surgeries in this shoulder i had really bad back the whole thing so i was taking vicodin from the doctor

Speaker 1 from the doctor right and then i got off of that and went on something called suboxone oh of course which is a disaster in its own right but I could function on it. Then I find it ibogaine.

Speaker 1 You know, ibogaine? Yeah. And I got completely that was.
How did that work? Well, you know, I was on this low dose of Suboxone for like 10 years. And it didn't affect me, but it's like, it's just not.

Speaker 1 Why do they do that? Because the pharmaceutical companies make a fortune with it. So they get everyone addicted to opioids.
Can you explain what that Suboxone is?

Speaker 1 So yeah, so Suboxone, so what happens is with the opioid crisis, right? Everyone's taking OxyContin and Perciden and Perk Percocet and Vicodin, all these, right?

Speaker 1 And they're giving them out like they're candy all over the place, right? So there's this massive opioid crisis, right?

Speaker 1 When they realized that especially OxyContin and fentanyl was so addictive and people were like dying, they said, we have to have a solution. So they put people on something called Suboxone.

Speaker 1 Suboxone is what they call a partial opioid agonist, meaning it binds to similar receptors, but it doesn't really get you high. And you can't really, it's very hard to overdose on it.

Speaker 1 This is like the modern methadone. Exactly.
It's exactly what it is, right? So it's much more long acting and And you could be on it and no one knows you're on it.

Speaker 1 But your mouth, maybe you're a little bit drier and so forth. You're a little bit tireder at night.
But generally speaking, if you're really careful, then you can live on that.

Speaker 1 And it's not the worst thing in the world. It's far better.
Does it affect your cognitive ability? Not at a very low dose. But the problem is most people don't stay at a low dose.

Speaker 1 They go up and they go up because they get a little bit of a high from it. So they abuse Suboxone.
And it's like a life sentence. And it's like, you're not good for your liver.

Speaker 1 You're taking an opioid, right? So I was on that for a long time at a very low dose. And finally, I said, you know what, I'm just, I want to be up.
I don't want anything in my system.

Speaker 1 So I went and did ibogaine in Mexico, in Cancun, which everyone heard of ibogaine. Ibogaine is a naturally occurring plant, right, in Africa.
Halucogen. It's a very powerful hallucinogen.

Speaker 1 But for some reason, it binds to the same opioid receptors as morphine, right? And vicodine, right? And it resets them. So it's this weird thing.
It resets you. It brings you back to pre-addiction.

Speaker 1 So when you're done with this 12-hour, nasty, scary, this trip is scary. I talk crazy.
What happens? It's not fun. I'm like, honestly, where did you do it? Hotel.

Speaker 1 I did it in a clinic in Cancun called Beyond, which is a great... I mean, I'd recommend this place to anybody.
It was amazing. And they really did an amazing job.
Very safe.

Speaker 1 It's all doctors, supervisor. You always hooked up to a heart machine because it can be taught on your heart, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they really support you emotionally, right? And when I did this trip.

Speaker 1 But what happens? So you take it.

Speaker 1 The guy tripped the scariest, ugliest, like terrible trip. But

Speaker 1 I was petrified before I started, by the way, because you hear all these horror stories about eyeball game, right?

Speaker 1 Where like you're seeing your, you know, dead people talking to you, and your father has talked to you from back, you know, my father's passed away, right?

Speaker 1 So you see all these visions and stuff, and you hear a lot of noises and like bugs. It's terrible.

Speaker 1 And was it as bad as you thought? It was pretty bad. It was, I was so, I was petrified.
I'll admit it. I was petrified.
The whole time?

Speaker 1 The first six hours is brutal. The second six hours is you're like, get me out of this room.
I just want to go like diaper boy. I want to do a primal scream, right? But, but what I did feel no

Speaker 1 it's scary as shit all right i'm telling you it is not fun at all right but i did feel it like burning out my reception i could feel it my brain working like i knew it like i knew as it was happening like i'm done with it like i'm not gonna need this stuff anymore right so anyway so after it was over like i recovered like that you know 12 hours i got out i never did another you know um any morphine or any narcotics ever again.

Speaker 1 That was it. It was done.
Amazing. Yeah, it resets your reception.
Did it affect you in any other ways?

Speaker 1 You know, some people, I think, have more of a spiritual journey

Speaker 1 because it's great for PTSD as well, like for veterans, right? So right now they're trying to fund studies for veterans. It's very helpful for PTSD, right?

Speaker 1 I didn't think it made that many changes in me. I was in a pretty good place when I went in there.

Speaker 1 I just literally had a physical, like a physical addiction that if I didn't take this stupid drug, I'd get uncomfortable and I didn't want to have that. Like I'm traveling all the time, right?

Speaker 1 So for me, you know, I didn't feel like I needed any profound changes other than that, you know, for the first 45 days, I had to learn to be like completely sober again.

Speaker 1 So it was, even though I had no physical

Speaker 1 withdrawals, I had some post-acute, like mental, I just didn't feel great. But then after like 45 days, it suddenly

Speaker 1 all the clouds lifted and I, you know, felt terrific again. So it was an amazing gift that I gave myself.

Speaker 1 And I would strongly recommend this to anybody who's suffering from, you know, opioid addiction right now. It's certainly a better solution than Suboxone.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, for me, it was, it was life-changing. So it's great.
And so you've never been tempted to go back to anything ever again? No. Never.
No.

Speaker 1 But I mean, I wasn't even, see, the thing was, I wasn't using Suboxone to get high.

Speaker 1 It was just a maintenance thing because I got addicted to these damn painkillers after my surgeries, right? So I was using it at a dose. It wasn't like I was trying to get high.

Speaker 1 So I guess if someone was like reluctantly put on Suboxone, because they were like a drug act and it was, you know, they just, they had to, because their life was so out of control, I guess they'd have to probably work through some therapy as well afterwards.

Speaker 1 But, you know, I think that's really helpful for that too. In other words, some people that go through ibogaine, when they emerge, they're like, they get this new perspective on their life.

Speaker 1 Like, why would I ever want to use opioids again? It's like disgusting and terrible. So,

Speaker 1 but it is incredibly powerful. Like, it is no joke.
It is no joke. Like, I've tried ketamine, you know, like, it's a great thing for not use ketamine now to expand your brain.

Speaker 1 I've tried other hallucinogens. I've tried mushrooms, right? You know, ibogaine is in a class of itself.
It's like not, like, no one would ever abuse Eibogaine.

Speaker 1 Like, you're not doing Eibogaine. Let's have a fun trip on Eibogaine.

Speaker 1 It's like, no, it's like, you know, it's like, let's go to the crazy house and like, you know, hold on for dear life for 12 hours and then all your addictions are gone. And it really works.

Speaker 1 It actually works. That is wild.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you keep in touch with anyone you were on Wall Street with? I do. Yeah, I still keep in touch with some people.

Speaker 1 From time to time, I speak to the Danny, the Jonah Hill character, other people that were, mostly people that were my good friends before, I still speak to, you know, but a lot of the people were like, you know, we employed about 4,000 people at Stratton over the years, probably more like five or six thousand people.

Speaker 1 And a lot of them, you know, they come and go. I run into them from time to time.
But, you know, my new life is very different. So for the last, you know, since 2009, right, I've been out there.

Speaker 1 coaching and you know mentoring entrepreneurs and on how to build businesses and how to do sales and increase their you know marketing capabilities right and i never talked about wall street never like i never wrote a book and that was really my core competency.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And what really made me do is honestly was my brother-in-law when I when I kind of saw him like just getting whipsawed I'm like you know what like there's two sides to I think to retiring and being wealthy or at least comfortable one is you want to make money when you're in your working years right so that's we all have to do that and you want to make as much money as you can hopefully doing something you like that's part of the equation right the next part is what do you do with the money that you can save from from all the hard work how do you put that money to work in a in a very safe, responsible way that's going to outpace inflation significantly, that's going to compound and allow you, when you're ready to retire, have an amazing life?

Speaker 1 I believe that people deserve that. So I look at this book as a gift.
If you read this book, really,

Speaker 1 it's like a blueprint, and it's really simple. It's like not that complicated.
But

Speaker 1 I knew that if I wrote the book in a dry way, people would not read it. So I wrote it in a very funny and more story, so it'd be really engaging.

Speaker 1 But as you go through that, you get this, what I consider to be a turnkey formula for a portfolio.

Speaker 1 Can I just ask a dumb question? So the SP 500 is 500 stocks,

Speaker 1 but they're not all in the same tier at all. I mean, they're thriving, emerging companies churning out a lot of profit, and then there are a lot of older industrial companies that aren't.

Speaker 1 So why wouldn't you just

Speaker 1 make your own SP 15 or 10 or 50? Why would you?

Speaker 1 Which ones though? And how do you know which ones are going to win and which ones are going to lose? So here's the thing, right?

Speaker 1 Human beings and even analysts,

Speaker 1 even experts, they're just terrible at picking the winning stocks. It's too hard.
So you're just imagine everybody is trying to do the same thing. What's the next winner? What's the big winner, right?

Speaker 1 So all the money is chasing after this pool of shares, right? So the question is, at any given moment,

Speaker 1 the way economics would say is that the market is fairly priced in this moment based on all the available information that's out there yeah this is what every single individual stock is worth right now over time right when you buy the s p now remember the s p 500 is the 500 biggest most profitable companies in the u.s they're in 10 different sectors but the s p the index committee every quarter will meet and say okay based on the u.s economy is the weighting of each sector correct do we have enough information stocks right do we have enough in industrials how much healthcare right so if you go back like 30 years, industrials are one of the biggest sectors out there.

Speaker 1 But then we exported our manufacturing base to China, right? And suddenly the financials become really big. And also especially computers and information and healthcare.

Speaker 1 So the biggest ones are now healthcare and computers, information technology. Those are your biggest sectors.
So what happens is the S ⁇ P will reweight itself every quarter to match the U.S.

Speaker 1 economy and any of the companies that are either underperforming, right, or becoming less relevant to their sector will be replaced by companies that are doing better and are more relevant.

Speaker 1 So you have at any given moment, the 500 best companies, all done for you for free by the S ⁇ P index committee who's selling that information, making money in a different way.

Speaker 1 They don't make the money. You can't invest in the S ⁇ P index because it's an index.
You need a fund. Right.

Speaker 1 So there's a very big difference because when the S ⁇ P first came out, you could only watch it. There was no way to invest in it.
It was like a benchmark. How am I doing compared to the S ⁇ P?

Speaker 1 You couldn't buy it.

Speaker 1 You'd have to go out and buy each of the 500 stocks, which is cost prohibitive and not, you know, you could just time prohibitive as well right so when the first s p 500 index fund came along it allowed people for the first time ever to buy all 500 companies in one trade right which is incredibly tax efficient and time efficient now what else happens once a company goes into the s p all the institutions have to buy it so there's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy part of it as well right so if You have information, like inside information, you're one of those rare people that can somehow, like one in 10 million people or 100 that can somehow figure out which stocks are going up are going to beat the s p god bless you right but my chance the chance of everyone listening is that's not you right you're not going to be able to beat the s p you don't think it's me you know you're even with my jim kramer strategy you don't think it's me so much so much talent as a speaker you know you see god would not give one man so much talent and so much insight fair fair right

Speaker 1 so anyway so so I really, it's been proven though, like I'm not just saying this. It's like, it's been proven by every study.

Speaker 1 when you read the book I go through every study in a very funny way and then when you like the last chapter is called meet the fuckers instead of meet the fuckers I call it meet the fuckers so who are the fuckers well the fuckers are the Jim Kramers of the world these are all the fuckers who are out there and he's just one of all the online the Charltons on TikTok

Speaker 1 these five stocks are about to moon what the fuck I mean come on like this stuff is littered all over the internet trying to bait people into making stupid investment decisions that are self-defeating it's the seminar guy who tells you to buy the magical trading system that's going to to beat the market.

Speaker 1 You can turn $50 into $5,000 in three months in your bathroom from home with my algorithm. Well, if it's so great, how come you're not using it yourself? Why are you freaking walking this?

Speaker 1 It's so ridiculous, but this is what, and people fall for it, right? Yeah, they do. All the time, and they end up getting destroyed.

Speaker 1 And you know when it really hits them when they're 55, 60 years old, and they don't have the money they should have.

Speaker 1 If you follow the advice in this book, which is arguably the best advice, Warren Buffett would give you this advice, seriously. It's an arguably great advice.

Speaker 1 And that is to play the long-term investing game, relying on compounding, meaning you start off with a small amount, as much as you can, right?

Speaker 1 And then add to it a little bit each month, whenever you can, as much as you can, and then also reinvest your dividends.

Speaker 1 So when you get quarterly dividends, because the SB pays a dividend, reinvest those as well, and just forget it. Don't worry about what's going on in the world.
Like you say, the U.S.

Speaker 1 economy is going to go to shit. Okay, maybe it will, maybe it won't.
Who knows? But here's the deal. No matter how shitty the U.S.

Speaker 1 economy gets, you're still going to have really big companies out there that are raping and pillaging, making a fortune out there. Like even the S ⁇ P, 500, half the business is overseas.

Speaker 1 They're multinationals, right? So you're getting overseas exposure as well. And, you know, listen, I'm also, as much as America is broken, I still have a believer in the American system of capitalism.

Speaker 1 I've traveled the whole world. I've never seen a country where they had this, like the drive and the ingenuity that we have.
The U.S. is a special place.
I don't care what's wrong with it.

Speaker 1 It's a special

Speaker 1 place. And also compared to what? It's the best bad option out there, right? So I really believe, and then also there's a couple other investments you want to make to balance out risk, right?

Speaker 1 You want to have what's called a bond fund in there. But again, none of this is about trying to pick which bonds are going to pay more than others.
You can't do that.

Speaker 1 You're trading against bond professionals that are like going to rip your eyeballs out every time to beat the market. So you want to be engaging in these like index, it's called passive investing.

Speaker 1 Yes. Not active.
Passive investing, right? It's exactly the opposite. I told people doing it.
So if I could sum up your advice, it would be ignore the experts and be passive, not active. 100%.

Speaker 1 Ignore the experts, especially Jim Kramer, by the way.

Speaker 1 I call him a carnival balking ass clown, okay? But I mean, that's totally fair. It's fair, but it's fully fair.

Speaker 1 And everyone used to, like, when I was doing my legal vetting, they got like, no problem there.

Speaker 1 At least once a day, I watched Jim Kramer on Sam Bankman-Freed.

Speaker 1 Just to make myself feel good.

Speaker 1 Well, that's another story to solve. The whole crypto world, right? With Sam Bankman Freed.
So he got, you know, listen, I knew that was going to happen.

Speaker 1 I think I was was asked by maybe by you, but what's going to happen with Sam Backman Fried. I said, this guy's going to go to jail for, I don't, listen, I don't think he deserves life in jail.

Speaker 1 No, I agree. But, you know, he's probably to get 20 years.
Very few people deserve life in prison. You know, but

Speaker 1 he's getting for a world. People who started the Iraq War do.
But other than that,

Speaker 1 that's pretty good. I agree.
Jordan Belford, thank you so much. My pleasure.
Great to see you. Thanks.
Thank you. Take care.