Will Cain Country - Jordan Belfort: This Is The Best Way To Get Rich

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Story #1: USA! USA! Former President Donald Trump's arrival at the UFC. Story #2: The biggest indication of something being true is when the media labels it 'misinformation.' Story #3: A conversation with The Wolf Of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort. Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail] Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for $5.5 plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. One, American badass, badass at the U.S. See. Two, once again, the biggest indication of the truth is something being declared disinformation. This time, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing. Three, a conversation with the Wolf of Wall Street. It's the Wilcane podcast on Fox News podcast. What's up? And welcome to Monday. As always, I hope you will download, rate, and review this podcast wherever you get your audio entertainment at Apple Spotify or at Fox News podcast.

You can watch the Will Kane podcast on Rumble or on YouTube and follow me on X at Will Kane. Today, we have a fascinating conversation with Jordan Belfort, the wolf of Wall Street. He has a new book out, The Wolf of Investing. He'll talk to us today about the economy, about the state of corruption in politics and Wall Street, and stories. What was real? What was make-believe? in the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio about his life, The Wolf of Wall Street. But first, story number one, on Saturday night, I committed to one of the smallest amounts of sleep I've done, at least in the advanced years of my life. I knew it was going to be a late night when I was invited by former Navy SEAL Bear Hanlon, the founder of Born Primitive Apparel Line, to join him and his

his brother at UFC 295 at Madison Square Garden. It was a fun night. The UFC environment is electric. I had never been to UFC fight. I'd been to some heavyweight, or rather not heavyweight, but big time boxing matches. I'd been to Canelo Alvarez versus Triple G. But this is my first time seeing mixed martial arts in person, going to the UFC. And it's awesome. I will say, in New York, it's wild, not just how legal, but how present in everyday life is weed. I mean, there are people smoking weed right next to you. There could be a 14-year-old sitting there with his dad and one row in front of them, somebody's sparking up a massive joint. But the fight itself, a lot of fun. But I will have to say the most notable moment of the night, because what was a card that was

supposed to feature John Jones, he tore his pectoral muscle, ended up featuring the biggest star, I guess, in America, former president, Donald Trump. Right before the main card kicked off, right at 10 p.m. The lights dimmed, the spotlight came on, and American badass by Kid Rock blared over the speakers. In walked, Donald Trump, accompanied by Kid Rock, and Dana White, accompanied by former colleague Tucker Carlson. They made their way to their seats to the raucous applause of the crowd, where also was awaiting another former colleague of mine, Dan Bongino. The crowd went absolutely nuts for Donald Trump. I'm just telling you, I'm just here reporting the facts, telling you the truth. It was the biggest cheer

of the night, of Madison Square Garden, and the entire crowd erupted into chance of USA. On a night when I watched fighter after fighter come in draped in their flag, the Mexican flag, the Czech flag, the Brazilian flag, the Russian flag. It was a moment of patriotism for America. And look, I have expressed to you my concerns about the passion out there to vote against Donald Trump. But what is clear is the amount of passion for Donald Trump. It was truly eye-opening. And it was also, regardless of your political persuasion, I did see a photo of Bill Burr, comedian Bill Burr, sitting in the same row right there next to Trump with his wife, giving Trump double bird. But regardless of your political persuasion, when that crowd erupts into USA, it is a lot of

is, well, badass. We'll be right back with more of the Will Cain podcast. Fox News Audio presents Unsolved with James Patterson. Every crime tells the story, but some stories are left unfinished. Somebody knows. Real cases, real people. Listen and follow now at Fox Truecrime.com. From the Fox News Podcasts Network.

Hey there, it's me. Kennedy, make sure to check out my podcast. Kennedy saves the world. It is five days a week. Every week. Download and listen at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Story number two. It is almost a truism in life that whatever is declared disinformation can quickly, or at least given a bit of time, be revealed as the truth. The Washington Post reports over the weekend that a Ukrainian operator, High-level military operative is responsible for the bombing of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

You'll remember the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is the gas pipeline that takes gas from Russia to Europe. At the advent of the early days of the war in Ukraine, that pipeline was destroyed. There was speculation at the time that the United States was behind it. There was seemingly at least good evidence of motivation with President Joe Biden saying things like, it will not come online, something will happen. And the incentive lied not with Russia, but in the enemies of Russia to cut off an economic engine for Russia and delivering oil and gas to Europe. But if you said that at the time, if you connected the dots, if you logically analyzed the news, you were accused of peddling Russian disinformation of being a puppet

of Vladimir Putin. Those are exact accusations. You can go back and look at this. stuff. But just like almost everything with COVID, it now turns out that wasn't Russian disinformation to doubt that it was Russia behind the bombing. Now, I don't know if it's true. I don't know if it's true what the Washington Post reports that Ukraine is responsible for that bombing. I actually have some questions about the capabilities of the Ukrainian military to conduct a secret clandestine op overseas outside their borders, high-level sufficient. and get away with it for that long. I have some sincere questions about whether or not Ukraine could pull that off, at least without assistance from a very powerful ally.

But without the ability to present you the evidence of who exactly is guilty, what I think is of note today is those who were so certain of the guilt of Russia declared everyone who dared to disagree with their propaganda in the, just like every war, the propaganda that declared something disinformation, misinformation. Man, there is no, I don't want to hear that term. I don't want to hear. If I hear that term, I think you're on the right track. We're going to step aside here for a moment.

Stay tuned. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at the quiz.com. Then come back here to see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz.

story number three he is the wolf of wall street jordan belfort the real life man behind the story of the wolf of wall street the martin scorsese movie starring leonardo decaprio he's got a new book out called the wolf of investing belfort joined us here on the will cane podcast to talk about what he learned in committing his crimes, what he thinks about being famous for, in essence, infamy and what he sees in the American economy and the American political system today, and most notably, how he thinks now you can get rich. His best advice in investing on Wall Street. Here's the author of the new book, the wolf of investing, Jordan Belfort. The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, here with us on the Will Cain podcast.

Great to see you. Great to meet you, Jordan. You got a new book out. You see it there in front of you. If you're watching, instead of listening to the Will Cain podcast, the Wolf of Investing. You have gone from a penny stock trader and criminal to a proselytizer of index funds, Jordan. Explain to me your new safe way of investing. What a long, strange trip it's been, right?

Well, I think that, you know, when I was at Stratton, I started Stratton as many, 30 years ago, right? And I started the big firms. I didn't start in penny stocks. I started a big firm, New York Stock Exchange stocks, this was before indexing was even really widely known, right? So that was where I was originally trained. After the market crashed 87, I ended up going to a penny stock firm because Walshie was closed for a while. so to speak, right? And then I ended up settling into these $5 wildly speculative stocks, right? And everyone knows the story. You've probably seen the movie. I helped me into jail, right?

When I got out of jail, I wrote the book, The Wolf of Wall Street, right? It became this huge hit. And from there, I started going around the world and speaking and mentoring people on sales, entrepreneurship and the mindset of success and so forth. And I built a great business. I'm very fortunate that, you know, I got a second chance and the movie was a huge hit. So, well, great. I never spoke about investing, never did, you know, and people would ask me all the time for advice, what should I buy, where's the market going? I never did it because I didn't feel comfortable doing it. Ultimately, I watched some of my own family just getting completely whipsword in the market, my brother-in-law, very successful guy, smart guy, educated guy, right, and his wife, and yet they're making these ridiculously foolish investments by simply not knowing the right way to invest. Now, at this point, obviously, I'm, you know, a totally different person than I was back at the Stratton days, right? And I'm like, well, how am I going to go out there and teach? Because I've, thankfully, a very large global audience, right?

It's the right way to invest. Now, I knew already that the answer to this was indexing. I did. Because I knew the index funds were by far the best long-term investment out there for the average individual and for everybody, not even rich, poor alike. It's historically academically proven to beat the overall, you know, any of the stock pickers, so to speak, were out there, right? But I said to myself two things.

Number one, if I write the book just like, hey, buy index funds, right? No one's going to read it because it's dry, boring, and they'll put it down. I have to write this thing in a kind of laugh out loud, funny, irreverent way that's going to make it a page turner. So I started doing a lot of research. And the more research I did, I was like, I mean, like, it's so obvious that, like, how to actually build a world class portfolio for anybody. And so the next challenge was how do I write in a funny way. So it would be a year and a half to do that. And I ultimately came up with the wolf from investing, which is basically it's like a five-step

process to building a world-class portfolio. And I think the mistake that most people make to what your average investors is they don't have that much money to start with. They'll make it with $10,000, right? That's $20,000, right? They're like, if I'm going to make any headway with that amount of money, I need to hit a home run. I need to like find the next Apple, the next Bitcoin, or some other trade in and out and your

options. or they think they have to make a lot, a huge profit with leverage attached to it to get wealthy. And that's not true. It's just, it's not true. Mathematically, you could actually go out there and make an awful lot of money over the long term through passive investing by buying an S&P 500 index fund and a couple of other investments. Buying in certain types of accounts where you can defer taxes as well, right, as much as possible. And if you do that, engage in what's called dividend reinvestment, you mean reinvest your dividends and add a little bit of money whenever you can,

hopefully every month, a little bit of money, whether it's 50, 100, hopefully a lot more. In 30 years, you have a massive amount of money due to this long-term compounding. It doesn't seem to be working in the beginning. In the first five years, like, it's not working on your return 12% I'm nowhere, but over time something magical happens. And it's truly magical. Long-term compounding is magical.

Suddenly, after like 20 years, it just shoots, the number shoots up, and a small amount of money becomes a massive amount of money. So my message to everyone is like, you know, the future's going to come whether, you know, you prepare for it or not. So either you can get F by the future, you know, you can, or you can get ahead of the future. And the way to do it is by following the strategy in this book, which is, I believe it's the best strategy for everyone, is to avoid short-term trading, trying to pick winning stocks,

and letting time do the heavy lifting. That's the short story. So I think it's Charlie Munger. It could have been Warren Buffett that described compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world. You know, you talk about in your first answer to me that time you spent on Big Wall Street,

anybody that's seen the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, will remember your time there, probably because one of the greatest scenes I can think of in cinema is you or Leonardo Caprio playing you, sitting in a restaurant with Matthew McConaughey, talking about the way you churn, you make money on Wall Street.

Now, I have a friend speaking of Munger and Buffett, who is a value-investing disciple of Munger and Buffett, and he has his own fund. And he's been preaching to me what you have just described for well over 20 years. While he wouldn't necessarily buy up for index funds, he said, look, the Wall Street game is essentially what was described to you in that scene with McConaughey. It's churn. It's short-term. It's movement.

Keep the investor movement moving. the opposite of buy and hold, the opposite of value, the opposite of long term. Exactly. So here's the way to look at it, right? Experts on Wall Street, stockbrokers, investment bankers, right? You know, analysts, people that really run these funds, these big hedge funds, mutual funds, right? In order to justify their existence, they have to be active. Imagine giving your money to a hedge fund manager and he just took it, bought the S&P. You say, well, why am I paying you a 20% performance bonus?

Like, what are you doing? You're not active. So they have to generate activity to justify managing money. And by the way, Jordan, and with that activity, you generate fees. Fees, even worse than the fees is the performance bonuses. So in the hedge fund world, right, it's like heads, they win, tails you lose. On winning years, so let's say they do well and they have a 15% return for a year. They have a 20% performance bonus that they pull off of that.

Yet in a losing year, the investors in the fund absorb 100% of the losses, and they don't give anything back. So it's like this completely lopsided structure. In fact, speaking of Buffett, he was so incensed by it that he called Wall Street. I called the hedge fund industry out. He made this million dollar bet. It's a famous bet in 2008. He goes, I'll put up 500,000, you put up 500,000. Any hedge fund, a group of hedge funds, you won't be able to beat the S-B500 over a 10-year period.

Let's see what happens. Someone took the bet, and it was a fund of funds. They put together a hundred of they thought the best performing funds, right? In year seven, they threw in the towel of the funds. They were so far behind after seven years that they gave up. And in 10 years, they got obliterated. And here's the weird part. Buffett's initial thesis was, listen, maybe you could pick stocks, okay,

but after your fees and commissions and the taxes that you pay and all the stuff, you're going to be behind anyway. Well, it was worse than that. Not only did they have to pull all these fees, but they were behind even without fees, it is really, really difficult to beat the S&P 500 on a consistent basis. It's proven, this is like every study.

There's a study I cited by a game, Paul Samuelson, famous he won a Nobel Prize for it, right? And he studied every mutual fund since the beginning of mutual funds in the 1920s. And what he found is that after they take their fees and commissions, they do not keep up with the actual index, the S&P 500. They're not as proficient at making money.

Yet they're charging all these massive fees. So that really was the first shot across the bow of the mutual fund industry and Wall Street at large and started this idea that an index fund, meaning a fund that didn't try to beat the market, but just bought the whole market, right? And with ultra low fees, virtually no expenses attached, right? And the company that started was Vanguard. And that started a revolution in investing. The problem is that there's something I referred to in the book I called the Wall Street fee machine complex, which operates the conditions. convince you that this is not so. They literally brainwash it with constant advertisements and infotainment like Jim

Kramer on CNBC and whatnot. He's not the only one, but he's a big one, right? And all the Charlton's on TikTok and Instagram, buy these five stocks that are about to moon, buy these stuff. I mean, this is all nonsense. It's historically been proven that it doesn't work, that the returns are far lower. And the question is why. I'll tell you why.

Because the S&P 500 is almost like this perfect animal when it comes to an investment. The 500 stocks that make up the S&P 500, they're the biggest, baddest, most profitable stocks companies in the United States, right? But those 500 stocks today are not the same 500 stocks from 10 years ago. Every three months, the committee that S&P meets and they remove stocks that are not doing as well

that are falling from grace to companies or becoming less relevant in the marketplace to their sector, right? Because it's 10 sectors. There's the financial sector. There's the information, technology sector. There's the health care. There's different sectors that mirror the U.S. economy.

So they adjust the weighting of the sectors based on what's happening in the U.S. economy. And they remove companies that are falling from grace and replace them with better companies. So once they're in there, all the institutions have to buy these companies. So it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And trying to beat these 500 companies that you could buy in one train with no taxes as they start to do their thing and make money. You're not paying taxes with every single trade, right? you pull so far ahead by investing through an index fund the right way, especially when you do it in certain types of taxes that you can defer taxes even better still. And I go through

all this in the book. It's a win-win situation for investors. What we're describing together, what you're describing to us is essentially the way Wall Street works. It's the casino. It describes the entire industry as a wolf. But what I would love to ask you is, and maybe it's, you know, the connection with Leonardo DiCaprio here. You know, in the movie, catch me if you can. DiCaprio played, you know, a con man. And it mirrors a real-life story as well. And at the end of that movie, he's hired, I believe it was by the FBI to help to help look for other con men's like the character he played and Catch Me If You Can. I'm curious, you know, as someone who has gotten caught being what we'll describe as a wolf, you're the self-described wolf in your

own story, if you were hired today by someone to point to the market and not indict the market at large, an indictment which I share with you on what you described a moment ago. But I guess, you know, I don't want to limit you to just, you know, sheerly criminal activity, but what should be criminal as well. I'll give you that playing field as well. Where would you point to as other wolves? So here's the reality. Wall Street is like this two-headed monster.

On one side, one head, right, there's this amazing value creation. They create massive value. Companies like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. They are necessary to the U.S. economy, to the world economy. They take companies public, provide future financing, secure the credit market, debt market. Without those companies, we would be in bad shape indeed. So Wall Street is necessary. They create massive value.

And I think anyone knows anything about finance would know that to be true. That's the one good side of Wall Street. Then there's the dark side of Wall Street, where they create weapons of financial mass destruction in the form of derivatives and credit defaults, things that are nothing more than gambling tools so they can make massive money on that. They create bubbles after bubble, after bubble. They are in bed with the companies that take public and issue animals reports that are not always accurate.

They're in favor of the people that they take public. They charge excessive fees, commissions, encourage short-term trading. They partner with Madison Avenue and advertising to put massive advertising out there to convince people to play the suckers game. And what is the suckers game? I'll explain it. So you said a casino, and you're right, the stock market is very much like a casino in some regard. When you go into a casino, right, a legitimate casino, right, legal casino, the games, the deck is stacked against you.

If you play long enough, you're probably going to lose 5%. That's, you know, it's like a 5 to 7% edge. Some games a bit more, some a bit less. But the odds are stacked against you, hence the profitability of these casinos. That's legit casinos, fair enough. But then you have corrupt casinos. The corrupt casinos have loaded dice and deal for. from the bottom of the deck.

That's Wall Street. That's the stock market that you buy into. When you engage in short-term trading, you are dealing in a place where the deck has been stacked against you and it's not legit. They have information before you have it.

They have faster computers than you have, so they front-run your trades for this high-frequency trading. They have edge. You can't compete as the average business. So play that game is a loser's game. It's a sucker's game. So like in the classic movie war games,

remember Matthew Broderick, to say, the only way to win is not to play. You can't play that game. You can't win at that game. So the question is then, how do you extract your fair share as an investor, as an individual investor? How do you extract your fair share of the massive value that Wall Street creates? And they do create massive value. How do you participate in that?

And how do you avoid getting caught up in the sucker's game in the corrupt casino? And the answer is by ignoring all the nonsense, the short, terms ups and downs and buy this sector, sell this sector. If you listen to Jim Kramer, he'll tell you, today you should buy oil and you should sell this stock, and Medda's probably going to have earnings that aren't as good. Sell meta. I mean, come, that's like a joke. Number one, the guy has no idea what he's talking about.

He knows about the market, but he doesn't know what stocks is Matt Fikon's and what stocks goes up, down, sideways, who knows in the short term, right? And he's wrong more often than he's right, and he just changes his mind the way the wind blows. You have to ignore all of that, all of that noise, all right? And by buying the best companies in America, like in one shot, there's this perfect mousetrap, right? The S&P 500,

you want to have a couple of other investments as one. It's all in the book, by the way, and it's very simple to do. It really is a turnkey solution, right? And by doing that, you get to participate in all the value that Wall Street creates.

Why? Because if they take a company public that ends up doing really well, where does it end up in the S&P 500? You're going to get exposure to that. But you don't want to do is trying to bet which one's going to out for which one you can't do it human beings are terrible stock pickers and it's just not going to work for you all right i got to ask you a few

questions about the wolf of wall street because anybody listening is going to want to know first of all what uh when you first saw the movie when you screened the movie or you look at it now what percentage would you say is real versus fictionalized so i would say like you know 90% of it's true right most of the stuff that's fictionalized is relatively minor like one thing is that the timeline is collapsed so it would appear that like every second on like something insane is happening in reality was like spaces in between some of those things so like it's true i sunk a yacht and i the plane crash but didn't happen like while i was on the i wasn't watching it fly it happened a week later right and like you know so there's a lot of stuff like that a lot of things were like were collapsed characters in other words where where like the danny character dot joanie jona hill right like all bad things that character got like some things that character got like some things that behaviors that were attributed to that character was like three or four other people, right? And they collapsed.

And the reason they do that is for the sake of the narrative. But generally speaking, the movie was very accurate and it captured like the insanity of the time. It was a very different time, you know, the 90s. This is before the advent of smartphones. Life was different. I think we forget before social media, before smartphones, with everyone at a camera, you know, it was happening.

It was not happening in that. You can't get away with stuff now. So we were doing things and engaging in behaviors that at the time of far more commonplace. And, you know, let's say, if you do that now, you're going to get filmed in trouble. What's the deal with Kualudes? So let me, I've never done a Kualoetud. I've never had a friend. I've never been around a friend that does Kualudes.

The movie is my closest exposure to Kualudes. And, again, that scene where DiCaprio drags himself to the Lamborghini. I don't know if that's actually how accurate that is. That's accurate. Okay. What's the appeal, Jordan? What's the appeal of a quailout? In fact, that the car, the actual Lamborghini right now is being auctioned off in, I think, Abu Dhabi for $1.5 million.

The crashed up car is now being auctioned off, right? Pretty interesting. The only problem was that in real life, it was Mercedes, not a Lamborghini, separate issue. But other than that, the whole scene is dead on balls accurate. So here's what a quailant is. It was designed to be a sleeping pill, a sedative, right? And it was supposed to give you like eight hours of restful sleep and you wake up feeling, refreshed. That's true. If you take a quaylude and you're in bed and the lights are off,

you'll be asleep in probably 20 minutes and you wake up with no hangover and it's really amazing, right? And great, great sleep. You get good quality sleep on it, right? Not perfect but good. But if you take a quailude and you fight that initial urge to sleep and you're up and around, you get the most kick-ass high in the world. You get the most euphoric high. It starts off with something called the tingle phase where your your fingertips start to like tingle you get this euphoric feeling like it's just like you're on cloud nine it's just amazing it lasts you're about 30 minutes that's phase one phase two of the quayload high is called the slur phase this way you start like slurring your words a bit you know and you start rounding out you love you yeah and you get the slurs and like and you love

everybody and you also get phonitis which means you want to call everyone you know and tell them that you love them so like my ex-wife she used to like unplug my phones when I was high on those because I'd be calling paper everyone and you think you sound perfect that's the thing you don't realize you're slurring you think you sound great right that lasts for about an hour then that kind of merges into what's called the drool phase where you start to like drool a bit because like you're getting sloppy and but you're like well drooling's not so bad babies drool i can drill you know drooling is just part of life right that's the drool phase and phase four is unconsciousness we just pass out wherever you are that could be in a restaurant in a bowl of soup in a rosebush somewhere

hopefully in your bed, but often not, because you took them when you're out and you resisted that urge to sleep. Those are the four main phases of the quailut high, and the amazing thing is that unlike alcohol, there's no hangover. So, like, you can do, you can get really just high as a kite and you wake up refreshed at the end of the day, so the next morning, right? So it was easy to abuse them, and the problem was this, is they were a legitimate drug. And like the opioid crisis today, and here's the difference, so the opioid crisis,

total disaster, right? where every doctor was prescribing these pill mills. The same thing happened with quailutes. There were all these doctors in pill mills. You're these places. They're weight loss clinics. They give you black beauty speed and then ludes to fall asleep. And people would throw away the black beauties and then take the prescriptions and crack the prescriptions, just like the opioid crisis.

The difference between the two is that opioids are necessary. Like there is legitimate. You need to have opioids in society. People are in severe pain, cancer. Like you cannot have a society without opioids. Doctors need to prescribe. opioids legitimately for pain, right? Not as much as they did, but they're legitimate.

So there are so many legitimate opioid prescriptions. For Quailudes, there's probably not one legitimate prescription ever written. Like, after the people just started abusing them. Like, no one used them for sleep. So there was no legitimate use case. Well, better sleepy pills came out afterwards. It didn't get you as high when you... So, in other words, Quailers were just fun.

It became like this ultimate fun party drug. And the DEA made them illegal, rightfully. So, thank God, by the way, because you can't get them because it's too, you know, I don't want to, near me at this point. You know what I appreciate about that? First of all, I appreciate that you answered that in thorough detail. But it also occurs to me while you're telling you that entire story. First of all, you're the same guy that there was a scene made about in a movie in, you know, requiring people to sell you a pen. So you're a talker.

You're a salesman. You know how to talk. But it occurs to me while you're giving me this answer. I've probably never, there's probably not a question I can come up with that you haven't already been asked about all of this. it's like you know halfway into my question what you're going to give me so here's what i'll ask you and i don't know you may be ready to go on this one too i don't know if it's natural talent of the salesman or it's the 10th time you've been asked this question you know you this movie has made you it's it's weird okay look you did some very bad things not just to yourself not just to

yourself but to other people and that has to be acknowledged and you have acknowledged it i don't know where you stand today with restitution i couldn't keep up with all of that but i don't even, I don't need to fall down that rabbit hole. What I do want to ask you is, you kind of got famous for the bad things you did in life, right? And like young men, including me, walked around quoting the speech of Wall Street, not Wolf of Wall Street, but of Wall Street. There are young men, like me, or much younger, who've seen Wolf of Wall Street, and they have a great time, and you become somewhat of an anti-hero or a cult hero. And yet you have to also know this is a

revolving around something that you've done that I would like to hope that you're not proud of in your life. So how do you kind of and by the way, the movie and these things that you did as well are the reason you and I are talking and why people know who you are and it will buy your book. How do you reconcile

all of that? The way people react to you versus the self-awareness of what you've done. So I think that's simplifying what the movie is about. So I think I think that people are smart enough to be able to take out the great things that I did in the movie. There's so much greatness that's in the movie of an accomplishment, starting a business

from scratch, not being from rich family, taking a risk, working hard, motivating other people, teaching others to sell, the camaraderie, the fun. All that was great. So you can actually, imagine all that happened, and the stocks were all great and worked and people made money. It would all be amazingly beautiful and great and everyone lives happily ever after. So I think you have to look past, okay, so I made some huge errors, no doubt. I'd like to know who hasn't made some huge errors in their life, but I made some really big ones, and I paid for those errors. But that doesn't negate all the great things that you saw happen in the movie,

building a company from scratch to thousands of people. It was a legitimate brokerage firm that's so legitimate. It wasn't like, you know, FTX were stealing the money out the back. But I did wrong was very, it wasn't like the companies weren't real. They were real. And some of the companies were massive sitting, Steve Madden's shoes. So it's far more complex than to say, I did terrible things. things you can't root for a guy or take out the great things he did as well.

So the idea is that when you model anybody, you want to emulate anybody, you don't have to emulate the entire organism. You could say, I love all those things that he did, but I don't want to fall into the trap that he fell into of getting caught up in greed and trying to make as much money as you can, as quickly as you can. So when I go out there and preach a message today, it's literally the empowering version of what you saw in the Wolf of Wall Street. You can do all that, but not get caught up in the shit.

So that's interesting. I mean, while you're talking, I want to be like, you know, well, Charlie Manson was incredibly charismatic, but he just used it for the wrong purposes. And you clearly are very charismatic, a great leader. And I'm not comparing you to Charlie Manson. It's just the first analogy that I could reach for, you know, but you clearly are charismatic. You're a great salesman. You are an analytical mind.

So I guess the question is then, like, how do you marshal that going forward, right? And the better question is, how do you see it going wrong? You threw the word greed. So when you did all that, you built the American company. You came from working class. You had these natural talents. So what pulled you wrong? Is it just simple old greed?

Yes, that's the simple answer, is that it's greed. It's certainly a big part of it, right? But I think it goes way beyond greed. It had to do with a couple of things. Number one was desire for short-term gratification. So in other words, looking to make money quickly. versus, you know, having, delaying that gratification,

which is really the wiser way to make money. But even taking it one step further, is that not understanding the purpose of what a business is. What is business for? What is the purpose of any business? And if you would have asked me when I was 24 years old, I'd say, well, it's the purpose of business to make money and get rich.

But that's not the purpose of a business. The purpose of a well-run business is to deliver value to people in a cost-effective way. So you have something that's valuable, either it's a service, a product, whatever that might be, and that represents value. The question is, how do you deliver that value to solve people's problems, to give them some benefit, right?

And do that in a way where you end up with a profit at the end of the day. And then the more people you can help, the more value you deliver, the more money that you make. That's what a well-run business does. That's frankly what I do today. Everything I do, the reason why my books do so well, this book, for a $20,000, whatever it is, you get massive value that could save you hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars. So, of course, it's a great value proposition.

When I teach a salesman to sell at seminars, of course, they're getting massive value. And this is going on for like 15 years, I'm doing it. So they keep coming back because they give value. It's when you don't give value, you charge a lot of money that suddenly the whole thing reverses on itself and becomes, whether it's a scam or just illegitimate or ill-intended, right? And that's not sustainable. So what makes a business sustainable is the value proposition. So I focus to everything I do today, I focus on giving more value than I would get to. back. For example, when the NFT boom was wild, right? I was approached by countless people to

launch NFTs. And I could have launched 10,000 wolves, right, and made $20, 30 million in a day. I never did it. I got close to the end, but when I actually got to the point where I was examining the value proposition, I'm like, there's no way this is going to end well for the people who buy them. So I didn't, I chose not to make $20, 30 million profit because I figured the people on the other end up losing. And that would have been right because all those NFTs are now worthless from all the people that sold them. And 24-year-old Jordan Belfort would have been all over NFTs. I would have sold the NFTs and never even thought twice about what the people would. That would have occurred to me because I would say, well, my business to make money, the question I asked myself, like that was how do I make more money?

The question I asked myself, today is how do I deliver massive value to people and monetize the value afterwards? So it's a shifted perspective. And I do better today than I did back then because it's more long term and it builds on itself. And more importantly, when I walk down the street or go any. anywhere in the world. People love me because they all get massive value and they, and especially the fact they look at the movie and say, well, look what this guy did. He turned his life around, came back from going to jail, losing everything. That's inspiring to people. Because everyone, people find themselves in bad spots, whether it's through their own mistakes

like mine, the economy goes bad, they make a bad decision, whatever it might be, or through no fault of their own and they're behind the April financially, even emotionally and love, whatever aspect, and they look at my life, say, you know what, this guy came back from the depths of hell and is living this amazing life with a great wife, great family, very successful for it. I can do it too. And then I actually show people the skills, whether it's entrepreneurial skills, sales skills, and then this is the first time I focus on actually, what do you do with your money? How do you invest your money wisely? And I'm proud of this book, because I know it's the truth. I know it's in arguably the best advice that anyone can give to an investor is in this book.

I know Warren Buffett would say the same thing in two seconds if he read it. No, he would. He would say, because he says it, by the way. No, because it's the right advice. So, like, I would never write a book saying, let me shouldn't have been, speculate. Like, I think people should speculate, but with 5% of their money and have fun.

That's the difference. I appreciate that answer. I truly do. I think that shows a great amount of self-reflection and wisdom. And it also highlights for me something I want to think about a lot is purpose. When you go into something, what is your purpose?

And you're highlighting that at one point, you would have thought the purpose was to make money. Now the purpose is to provide value, and that changes the entire. That changes all the skills that you had, the talent that you had and the outcome. You brought up FTX. I want to ask you a couple questions, sort of marked wide really quickly. What's your estimation of what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried?

Was that purely criminal? I mean, it certainly sounds to be, and it seems to be wrapped up in politics, but it's so confusing and it's huge. What happened in your estimation here? Was that just a criminal enterprise? Criminal enterprise. Clearly criminal enterprise. Now, what you probably thought, I'm guessing, is that, I can take their money, use it and make more money and give their money back.

He probably thought he'd give their money back one day and not lose so much money and the other son is Alameda trading, right? So my guess is that he probably thought he'd get away with it, which is a lot of a lot of these, you know, people that are, it wasn't really so much of a Ponzi scheme. It was on some levels, it was just a blatant thievery. It was just like people sending in their money and like they just took it out of their accounts and put it into his trading account, right? Like, you know, those are things that never even occurred to me.

In my worst days, it's Stratton, like, because he's so easy to get caught. part, number one. It's like not even, it's like the most unelegant blunt crime, and let's take people's money, right? My guess is he probably thought he could make money and then eventually give it all back. It'll go public or raise his way out of it, right? And then, unfortunately, when Bitcoin

went down and the market crashed, right? Well, he came a victim of his own right, and that was that. How do you explain sort of the nuance some people try to inject into his situation, whether or not, I can't come up with the names, but I feel like some fairly sophisticated recently. I read some sophisticated investors said,

you know, it wasn't as bad as it might have looked and he was brilliant and maybe even some politicians have acted like, you know, this thing might have been able to find its way to better legitimacy. And I wish I could have. Absolutely not. I wish I could call up who said that. But you may know, there's been some like sophisticated legitimate investors kind of rally to the side of Sam Bankman-Fried. Anyone that rallied to the side of Sam Bankman-Fried probably was in bed with Sam Bankman-Fried in some way or invested money with Sam-Bank-M-Fried because I couldn't imagine how you could say that knowing anything about the crypto market

or the stock market. It was blatant, promatial fraud. It's against the law. You cannot take in money from customers to just use it. It's got to be segregated. There's no ifs, answer, buts. It's just blatant thievery.

I don't know how they could be saying that. Now, if it's a politician, well, maybe they have just no idea about how investing works, right? But one of the fundamental rules when you are self-clearing is that customer funds are segregated. They need to be set.

You can't use your customer's funds, right? And this is, he's not the first person to do it, right? It happens in other industries as well, like in builders. So you see builders get indicted because they had five projects. They stopped robbing for one project to pay for another project. This is illegal. But in the stock market, or in this case, the crypto market, it's very regulated, right? Even like, well, there wasn't regulations for crypto spec.

There's still fraud regulations. You can't steal people's money, which is precisely what he did. So I don't think he's very. brilliant at all. I think he's kind of an idiot, the guy. I think, you know, he had the, you know, he was like, used to, the, could a nerd, I'm the nerdy genius facade, like to me, he's so smart. He doesn't even pay attention. He's that smart, you know, the guy's an idiot, honestly, okay, to do what he did was so ridiculously, it's such a low level, like, the guy from Terra Luna, you know, the whole disaster with that, with Terra and the stable coin, right?

The alleged, the not-so-sable, stable coin, right, that lost, you know, people, $50 billion, right? that was another one, right? At least that was more elegant. Like he was, he was like, his thing was pretending it was a safe investment, was wildly speculative. But what Sam Banking free did was just like plain, like send me your money and I'm going to take it out the back door and trade with it. There's no ifs and buts to that, in my opinion. Okay, so let's round it out with this. You know, in talking about index funds and your advice to invest along with the market at large, what you're also doing, Jordan, is you're advising essentially, essentially, betting, essentially, betting,

on the American economy and in short than betting on America. I think I know your answer. You wouldn't be saying what you've been saying so eloquently today. But you feel good about the future of the American economy, about the long, I mean, there are people today

that have questions about corruption at every level of our society, from politics to Wall Street and whether or not everything is a rig game. And whether or not there is a big chicken coming home to roost when it comes to how much money we've been printing and the debt bubbles we're living under, whether or not all that's going to result in a minimum of a serious recession.

What do you say, how do you respond to that? What I also hear you saying is no, bank on America? So, good question. So number one, I would look at the American economy with all its problems, including debt, massive debt, right, as the best bad option out there. So there's no better option. I've been all over the world. I've traveled the world.

I've spoken. I've mentored people around the world, coached them, been hired by companies all over. And there's something about America. You could hate our country. You could hate the system. You're right. I agree with you about corruption. Yes, it's so terrible, right?

But the entrepreneurial mindset we have and the tracker we have and the capital marks we have are the best out there. And they lead to the creation of massive wealth. What happens when this deck is so stacked against the average person is the wealth gets concentrated at the top. It's the average person and people in the lower middle class and, They get squeezed and the poor people get poorer. Middle class gets Sweden, the rich get squeezed, the rich get richer. So what I'm advocating here is no one buying the richest, biggest companies in America. They're going to do fine no matter what.

So I think that as things get tougher and tougher, it's going to, wealth will be concentrated at the top. So now you're essentially, your exposure is at the top of the market. You're not trying to buy the small companies. You're buying the biggest companies. That's number one. Number two, 40% of their business is done overseas. They're multinational companies. So by buying into these multinational companies, you're getting global exposure as well.

These are impeccably well-run companies. And again, I do believe in America. It's for all the problems that we have, especially the political side. So, yeah, it enrages me when I see the corruption, right? But, you know, I also think that as an empowered individual, whoever's watching this are listening to this, right? You could say, I'm so angry. I'm going to sit home and, like, you're going to stomp my feet, or you say, well, I better

make as much money as possible and secure my future because I can't count on the government for my retirement. I don't think you can count on social security for very much at all. So you need to be self-inpower. You need to do it yourself. So what I'm talking about in this book here is not about speculating in stocks. I'm talking about a proven long-term way to secure your retirement for you and your family. And you can end up wealthy by using the advice in this book, even if you're not wealthy now by allowing just market forces in time to do the heavy lifting for you. And that's the best advice I can give anybody, matter what age you are. The younger than better, but it's never too late.

And what's your advice for America? I know at one time you like Trump. I feel like you've gone back and forth on more Trump, less Trump. Are you ready for a different Republican? Put Trump against Biden. I'll choose Trump every time and twice on Sundays. I think Biden's the biggest disaster ever. although it's not Biden. Bind's a cutout for Obama at all,

people that are running, but Bine's senile. We all know that. I mean, I'm not even, I used to feel like a little twinge of embarrassment. He's, he's senile. I mean, the guy can barely walk and shoot gum with this. He can barely walk without showing gum, right? So that's on that side, other things about Trump that bother, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of stuff I don't like about Trump.

I thought the country was in much better shape when Trump was president. I was hoping that like a better version of Trump would come along, The sad, I was, let me, I'm in Florida. I love to say it. I think he was an amazing governor. But for whatever reason, it's not his time. It seems like he's not his time. You know, Trump has got a very strong base.

And also, he's being persecuted right now in the most ridiculous fashion. And so it makes me more sympathetic towards Trump. Makes me like him more. The fact that he stands up to this was political persecution at the highest level. I never, don't I ever see this in the United States, right? So, you know, Yeah, I vote for Trump over Biden any day. I was hoping someone better would come along.

It doesn't seem like to have so. You know, you take the best, bad option. And as well, you said the best bad option in the economy is America. Man, this has been a great conversation. I'm excited to have talked to you, Jordan. I think there's a lot of wisdom to glean here. And the book is The Wolf of Investing. Thank you so much.

You get Amazon or anywhere else, by the way. It's on Amazon and every bookstore. So check it out. All right. Thank you, Jordan Belfort. Take care. There you go. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jordan Belfort.

Remember, check out his new book, The Wolf of Investing. That's going to do it for me today here on the Will Cain podcast. I will see you again next time. Listen to ad free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members, you can listen to this show, ad free on the Amazon Music Act. Following Fox's initial donation to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, our generous viewers have answered the call to action across all Fox platforms and have helped raise $7 million. Visit go. Dot Fox forward slash TX flood relief to support relief and rebuilding efforts.