The One With Jordan Belfort: The Wolf Of Wall Street - Bonus Episode - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Hello, this is Joe Polish with Piranha Marketing. And I wanted to do a pre introduction to an interview you're about to watch with the real Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort. Now, this interview was actually conducted a couple of years before the movie came out. And Jordan knew that they were doing the movie, of course, and he was telling me about it. So I actually met Jordan by a friend who said, you got to meet this guy. He's wild, he's crazy. He teaches a straight line system. He went to to prison for securities fraud. And now that he's out, he actually teaches people how to sell and ethical persuasion. And I was like, huh, this is kind of interesting. So I ended up meeting Jordan and the guy is extremely animated, extremely comical, and he has some very interesting persuasion techniques which he actually teaches people. Now, if you see the Wolf of Wall street, the way that Jordan is depicted, it's really easy to say, wow, this guy's a total scumbag. Now, the whole purpose of, of this interview, you decide for yourself what you can learn from Jordan and what you pick up from this interview. So I just want to have you watch the interview. Hopefully you find it interesting and useful. And whatever you do, marketing wise, selling wise, always do it in an ethical way.

No matter.

You can learn some incredible amount of stuff from people that don't always follow their advice and people that go over the top with things. But I learned a long time ago, all money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation. So whatever you do for a living, if you create value and people pay you, that's the greatest way to not only get rich, but also be able to sleep at night and know that you're walking through the world adding tremendous value. So enjoy the interview. This is Joe Polish here, and I.

Am here with Mr. Jordan Belfort, known as the author of the Wolf of Wall street and the Actual Wolf of Wall Street. So Jordan, for people that have no idea who you are, who is Jordan Belfort? And maybe some kind of a short history.

Sure. So I'm a guy that when I was very young, in my early 20s, I went down to Wall street, no money in my pocket, negative $50 net worth, and I went to work for a big firm. And it was right around the time of the crash, and when the market crashed, which, believe it or not, was actually my first day as a stockbroker, I was really forced to leave Wall street. And I stumbled upon Some smaller firm out in Long Island. I was living in New York at the time. Time. And what ended up happening, to make a long story short, this is a short interview. Here is I kind of mixed what was happening in the bigger firms on Wall street with the smaller firms on Wall Street. And I uncovered a niche in the market. And I took that niche and essentially built what was what became the largest independently owned brokerage firm on Wall Street. Retail firm, meaning we cold call investors. And I stumbled upon this system really out of desperation to try to train all these young kids called the Straight Line. And the Straight Line system was really behind this massive success I had at taking average people and turning them to unbelievable closers, both in person and on the phone. So the problem with the Wolf came into play was when I sort of lost my ethics along the way and became this sort of ravenous, greed fueled animal, which is not that uncommon on Wall street, unfortunately, but no excuse, and went out there and I ended up, you know, manipulating some stocks and having to do 22 months in jail and start again, essentially. But I made, you know, a couple of hundred million dollars along the way and had the wildlife. And when I was in jail, I went through this sort of cleansing process. And I ended up writing this book right here, the Wolf of Wall street, which is my nickname was the Wolf. And as soon as the book was published, it became a bidding war between Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. So I sold the book to Leonardo DiCaprio and Marty Scorsese. There's a big movie coming out next year about my life and times on Wall Street.

Well, now the book is fascinating, it's entertaining, and, you know, it even says here I partied like a rock star and lived like a king. I mean, how much of this is real versus exaggerated in the book?

If anything, it's under exaggerated. I mean, there were some sections that when I wrote the manuscript was 1300 pages. The book was 530 pages. And there are a couple sections with my editor. She's a great lady, very smart. She's like, Jordan, I don't think other human beings will understand some of this. I said, well, I know a few human beings. I want this to maybe be able to tone it down a bit. But the stuff that's in the book is 100% true. Some of the dates are changed around just to support the narrative. But the book is 100% fact.

Okay, well, I'm totally looking forward to.

Seeing this, which is not a fact I'm proud of, by the way, because some of the stuff is nothing to be proud of, but it's a good read. It's funny in that.

Well, you know, you actually, I mean, there's nothing that you seem to be afraid of not saying. I mean, you know, here we are in a short break during an event where you're actually teaching people about venture capital, about ethical persuasion, which is now what you teach. And I mean, you're pretty explicit and you seem to not have a real concern or fear of what people are going to think and you want to just tell the truth. I mean, I think a lot of people, they're dirt, if they have any, and most people do. They're very protective about it, which you.

Just kind of put it out there. Was it being in jail that put.

You at that point or were you.

Always that way on some level? I was always that way. I was never really embarrassed about the decisions that I made. But in terms of, you know, when it started writing this book, I knew that unless I really came clean with my story that a. The press would skewer me because my life before the book was a very public affair. Both my rise and my fall was well documented. So if I tried to sort of, let's say, dumb down what I had done or, you know, kind of gloss over and not really admit what I had done, I think the book would have been far, let's say less well received. And I think also that to really paint the picture both on the good side and the bad side. My goal when I wrote the book was was to essentially bring the reader into the story. And to do that you have to be very descriptive. You rely a lot on dialogue. So I wanted to give people a flavor of what it was like to be in the head of the space I was in. In other words, the book is written in the voice, not today's voice, but the voice that was playing inside my head in 1989, 1990. So that voice sometimes is a disturbing voice. It's a funny voice, for sure, ironic, self serving, and sometimes despicable. So I knew that if I wrote this book, I had to put it out there. And in terms of the way I am now, I think that my life serves on one side of the equation as a cautionary tale to know what I've done wrong and the price I hate for it. And on the other side, I think in the more important side, in terms of the stuff that we do, in terms of mentoring people and coaching people and helping people achieve wealth and success, the bottom line is that strategies that I use that most successful people use when they're watered down, filtered down and diluted, they just don't work. What really works typically is the highest level of a strategy, not the one that's sort of, you know, kind of the key pieces are missing for whatever reason. So I get brutally honest and I show people that on the bright side of my story, that you can be as low down, I mean, the bottom of the barrel with seemingly no hope. And when people look at my life and they see what happened, I was the bottom and I came back stronger than ever. It gives them hope in their own lives to know that no matter how low they fall. And I won't get sunk on the totem pole of life, of relationships, of money, of self respect, as long as you're willing to put one foot in front of the other and take a step forward, another step forward, and follow some simple, proven rules that yield success, that yield wealth, and do it in a way that has integrity and ethics versus What I really missed the first time was not the ethics integrity. If you do it right and put one foot in front of you, use strategies, you can achieve massively no matter where you are.

Gotcha. Well, now is Wall street, predominantly. I mean, how ethical is Wall Street? Let me back up and even have you define what is an ethical way of running a business, because you now teach ethical persuasion. But I'd love to hear the Jordan Belfort definition of ethical. I mean, what does that even mean?

I think, you know, there's lots of definition of ethics. I think on one level, ethics is doing the right thing when no one's looking on one side of the equation that, you know, it's not about whether you'll get caught or whether you won't get caught. It's not about that. It's about doing what's right, no matter what. On a simpler level, say a more transactional level, the idea would be that if you're ethically persuading someone, you're helping them do something they should be doing versus something that they should not be doing, or let's just say getting someone to buy the appropriate amount of something versus 10 times of what they need. So the first one's the ethical side. Second one is the unethical side. Very often. And one of the negative anchors I had to my own situation was that I invented this really powerful strategy which, you know, called the straight line system. It's really kind of probably technically the highest level out there of influence. When I first invented that, you know, it was unbelievable. And people that were non salespeople became salespeople. People that were scared of selling started to embrace the idea that they can influence, speak from the heart, use a simple way to move someone from uncertainty to certainty, which very often selling is about. And when I first started my new life and I got out of jail and I started getting all these requests to come train, I was like, oh, no, the straight line, it's evil. There's no ethics. And that's a lot of crap. It's not the system that's broken. What was broken was my ethics were missing from what I was doing. So if you influence somebody to buy a phone and they're in desperate need of a phone, well, hey, great, the price is right. That's a great thing to do. But if they already have a phone and you basically use the system to say your phone stinks, this is the better phone. Despite the fact that it's twice the price and has all these features you'll never use, this is the phone you ought to buy. If you don't buy this phone, you know everyone's gonna look at you like you're a fool and blah. All the reasons why you could convince someone. So that's not ethical persuasion. But again, in the right circumstance, getting someone to do something to make a move that empowers them versus disempowers them, well, that's a great thing to do.

Okay, great. Thank you. Now, what's your take on the ethics of Wall Street? Back in the day and then currently today? I mean, is it just a. I.

Mean, ethical toilet bowl? Listen, the easy answer and the answer that most people want to hear is that Wall street is devoid of ethics. There are no ethical people on Wall Street. It's all about making as much as you can as fast as you can, and you don't care who gets hurt along the way. That's what people, I think on some level want to hear.

Yeah.

Which I don't believe to make sense of what happened. But in fact, it's not true. There are a lot of ethics on Wall Street. There are. The problem is, if it's 90% ethical and 10% ethical, that 10% kills you every single time in banking, especially when you're dealing with products like derivatives and credit default swaps. With this massive leverage, everything is magnified dramatically. So even the littlest bit of fraud could take down an entire institution. Look at aig. You're looking at a company that ran for how many decades is an insurance company. It's a blue chip insurance company with an Impeccable reputation. And there's one division inside AIG is issuing these derivatives, these credit default swaps, and as Warren Buffett terms them, instruments of financial mass destruction. Right? And that little division brought down the entire insurer, as did it bring down Lehman Brothers, as did it bring down Bear Stearns and forced Merrill lynch to merge with Bank America, and so on and so on. So the problem is not that there's no ethics on Wall Street. It's that the nature, the very nature of the business doesn't allow for even the slightest bit of ethical lapse. So I think the lesson to be learned from what happened over the last five years or so is that you can't be half pregnant when it comes to ethics. Either you're going to operate in an ethical way or you're not. And if you're not, then ultimately you might make more money over the short term, because you very often can. But in the long term, you're going to get slaughtered.

So, gotcha.

Okay, now.

So having been in the dark side and now gone through it, I mean, because people always have to wonder, can a tiger change its stripes? I mean, really.

Or a leopard change the spot? Yeah, whatever.

You know, whatever.

A zebra, you know, whatever you want to use as the analogy. I mean, can people really.

Do they really change?

I mean, is there.

Good question, and here's the answer. I think the answer is yes, but very, very infrequently. And the way that relates to myself is I don't really view myself as a leopard who changed his spots. In fact, I started off good. I was raised well by a family that had the highest ethical standards. So I started off as a good boy. I didn't go into the world as a sociopath. I went into Wall street and allowed myself to get corrupted by greedy and drug addiction. So it wasn't like I was this awful human being from the start. I was a good kid that did everything right and well in school. And I was really supposed to go one way. And I took a left turn at Albuquerque. Somehow it ended up in this place where I was doing things I never thought I'd do, associating with people I never thought I'd associate with. And it all seemed perfectly okay. So my transition wasn't so much from this awful human being to this pillar of the community. I started off as a pillar of the community, took this left turn, Albuquerque, and then kind of got my compass back later in life. And that's really more. That's a real more accurate description of my journey.

Gotcha Gotcha. Okay, so for entrepreneurs that are out there, what advice would you give them on really how to get rich or how to get wealthy or just do better? What's it take?

A few things. I mean, on some level I teach, when I give a seminar, I teach that there basically are two worlds that you need to master in order to really achieve wealth and success at the highest level. And those worlds are the inner world and then the outer world. And the inner world, meaning what happens up here between your ears before you ever go out and take an action in the real world. That would be the outer world, essentially. Right. So the four distinctions that are really the crucial distinctions, things that you have to master at a reasonable level. And the first is the ability to manage your emotions, your emotional state. There are certain states of mind, certain emotional states that lead people to massive poverty. States like fear, like greed, uncertainty, confusion, overwhelm. Then there are other states that set you up to be massively successful. States of certainty, states of compassion, states of clarity, states of courage. Right. So the first step is you could be great as an entrepreneur, meaning you have great business skills, you know how to build a company, you're a great salesperson, a great marketer. But if you're walking around all day long like an emotional basket case, good luck trying to be wealthy and successful. You'll make money. Then you'll make bad decisions because you're in a disempowered state. You lose money. Right? So you have to learn, not always like a robot, but you have to learn that when it matters, in that key moment, you have to be able to trigger the right state, which is not difficult to do. So I teach people how to do that, when to do it, and why to do that. Second thing is your beliefs. Essentially the beliefs that you hold about yourself, about your capabilities, about money. Whether you have beliefs that attract money to you or that repel money, whether that you have beliefs that allow you to move through barriers and obstacles, or beliefs that cause you to shy away from barriers and obstacles. And the beliefs that we have really control our actions. We don't typically go at things or do things that we believe we're not good at. We don't take actions. If we think we're going to fail, we shy away. And then of course, we don't say that we're scared. We come up with a story. So the sort of these negative, these limiting beliefs instigate the telling of bullshit stories to ourselves, right? And it holds us back from success. So the idea is that is to Understand what your core limiting beliefs are, and then to actually break those beliefs. And you can do that. It's not that difficult to do it. Do it in a seminar setting. You break the limiting beliefs and you essentially empower somebody by helping them install their own beliefs in themselves. Your beliefs are malleable. You can change them. So the idea is to essentially retrofit your beliefs to serve you and your outcomes. In the case of entrepreneurs, it's the money is not the root of all evil, that building a business is possible, that I can learn whatever I need to know those sort of beliefs. Right? Third element on the inner game side is what your personal standards are. Your standards for life of excellence, or your standards for being average, or you have standards for being extraordinary. They're all different levels of standards. And on some level, your standard, which is really like a thermostat, it's where you're going to end up. Now, your standards is not a constant. Where you're like, this is my standard. If you have a standard at any given moment in time, you'll be slightly above your standard or slightly below your standard, but that standard really dictates sort of where you end up over the long term. So there's many people out there, for instance, that, you know, they have a standard. They need to make $200,000 a year. So they make $200,000 a year. Because what happens when they go over that? They back off. Other people have a standard. They make 2 million a year. I won't sell until I make 2 million. Right? Those people end up at 2 million. So the idea is that to first realize what is my standard, and does my standard serve my outcome? Is my standard too low? Is my standard unreasonable? Does any kind of conflict and this dissonance between where you want to go, what your actual standard is, then you need to either raise your standard or sometimes even it could be lowering a financial standard if it's corrupting the rest of your life. But typically what we find is that people have financial standards that are really not serving. They're a little bit low, and they could raise them up. That's the third thing. Fourth thing I teach on the inner game side is your ability to focus on your outcome, to know where you want to go to a create and build in your mind a bold vision for your future, a vision that inspires you, not a goal. We all set goals and we abandon them and we set new goals. Goals are great, but on top of your goal, you need something more powerful, something more inspiring. Your vision. You Know, there's very few people in the world that have a bold vision for their future. Everybody's thirsty for one. So what do we do if we don't have our own vision? We gravitate towards someone that has a strong vision as an entrepreneur, as a leader. If you want to be successful really and achieve, you need to A, have a bold vision for your future that inspires you first and then B, figure out how to communicate that vision. A strategy to make that vision known to everyone around you so they want to buy into it with their time, money, or both. That's inner game stuff. The vision side. Now we flip to the outer game. And these are the skills in the real world that you need to know, starting with entrepreneurship. You know, it's one thing to say I'm an entrepreneur, it's very much another thing to actually have the skills required to be an entrepreneur. And just so you know, typically, I mean, of course there's exceptions to every rule, but most of the time it's not the entrepreneur gene dropped out of the sky inserted in your DNA. Entrepreneurship is a learned skill. There are certain core business skills that are easy to learn that you have to know, and if you don't know them, you're going to feel pain. So to put it in simple terms, we don't know how much time is that. There are two things you need to master as an entrepreneur. Number one, how to fail elegantly. Meaning how do you start a business or launch a new division or test something? And when you're wrong, the consequences are not that severe. You don't kill yourself. There's a lot of people, they don't know how to do it. They take a shot in life and they just set themselves to get destroyed. Right? So learn how to fail elegantly. Not that difficult. And on the flip side is that when things do go right, learn how to succeed wildly, how to leverage yourself, how to duplicate yourself. These are core business skills and strategies that allow any human being that when you have a good idea, it's working small to grow it big. So fail elegantly, succeed. While that's your basic entrepreneurship skills, after that we have our core skill for making money, which is selling influence, persuasion, which is probably what I'm best known for, the straight lines. How do you really take someone from a place where they're not sure about your good, your service, your product or you and make them very, very sure about you, that you the best things in sliced bread, that your product works that so you know all that stuff that goes along with that and then of course with that comes this ability to communicate your vision. Like I said, yeah, vision is on the inner game. But unless you can communicate, sell that vision to other people, it's very difficult to be a one trick, only one man, show yourself. So to build a team. So that ability to communicate. Then there's the next distinction, which is number three, which is your expertise, which is marketing. And marketing is about, you know, bringing massive numbers of people into your sales funnel to attract people. But not just any people attract qualified people. You know, how do you identify your target market? What are the strategies that allow you to really have a message to market match, to contact a lot of people at once in a cost effective manner and attract them to whatever it is, Whether it's your landing page, an incoming call, it doesn't matter to walk into your store, whatever your business is. But without the marketing equation, you know, you'll be selling and selling and selling. It's all cold. So at the highest level, companies that succeed, they have not just a great sales program, they have a great marketing program as well. And of course those two skills, sales and marketing, really do fall into entrepreneurship. But to me they're so important, so critical that I broke this, you know, this entrepreneurship. Okay, then let's talk about where the rubber meets the road. Sales, marketing, right? And Then lastly, the fourth distinction of the outer game is what I call MSIs. Multiple streams of income. And that means what do you do after you've made money? How do you take your money invest, how do you diversify yourself and create these passive streams of income so you're over the long term, your money ends up working for you instead of you always working for money. So those eight elements, you know, the inner and the outer game, the idea is that you have to line up those elements to get, become an expert in all the things or at least good enough so it's not holding you back. We all have things with better act than others, right? But you get those elements lined up and bam, you can't help but become successful. I'm a big believer that the only way to get rich in this world is quick. You can't get rich slowly. The world's far too expensive to get rich slowly. I'm not talking about a get rich quick scheme. It's very different. What I'm saying is this, you could be failing, failing, failing, not getting result, not getting result. And then bam, that last piece of the puzzle falls in place and the money starts pouring in. So what's really happening is people say wow. Yeah, that's true. But why? Well, the answer is, one of those eight skills was missing. You were lacking something. It's not an accident. If you're not making money, then it's not because God is against you or the world is against you. That's your story. What's happening almost all the time is that you're missing a skill. Either you don't have the marketing figured out, the sales, the operational side of it, or you're emotionally a basket case. One of those things is happening. So the idea, what I do when I teach people, really, they go through my system. It's not just about learning how to close or learning how to market. It's about taking all eight skills and getting to this level where you're, you know, and there's no perfection, but getting to this level where you're so competent, all eight, and then you killer at a few of them and then you get rich the next day. No, but then you work. You work and that spark happens and boom. Once that spark ignites, you can't help but get rich quick because that's how it happens. It happens quickly. Absolutely. And that's really what I teach. To sum it up is the skills that are required to essentially take any vision that you have, any business idea, package it, position it, and monetize it. That's what I do.

Awesome.

Last thing I'll ask you is you have a couple of kids and you know, as you know, certain advice could send them in one direction or down another direction. What would be the best piece of advice you would have for anyone who's a kid, a teenager starting out in life and business? What would you say to them?

I think that there's many lessons, but the number one lesson. Let me give you two lessons. Number one is choose something that you do, that you love, that you're passionate about. That's like a cliche, but it's true. You know, there's many, many ways to make money in this world. It's easy to get rich. It's not hard. It's easy. That's one of the best kept secrets in the world. That's easy to make a lot of money. But you can make money in ways that you know are easy and fun. It's part of your system. Right? Easy, little bit of fun. Right. And you can make money in ways that are a real pain in the ass, where it's hard work. It doesn't empower you, it doesn't inspire you. So number one is choose something that's going to Feed your spirit, it's going to feed your soul and inspire you first, second. And I think if it's this, the most important thing I could ever teach someone is delay your gratification. Don't always make your decisions based on what makes you feel good in the moment. Very often what gives you instant gratification is gives you long term pain. So I refer to as playing the movie out a bit longer. Don't make your decisions based on, let me see, I'll make this decision, I'll play the movie out for a week or two and I'll feel good. But then not going two, three years down the road where you have massive pain. So if I could whisper back in my ear, go back to my 24th birthday, right, when I started making $50 million a year at the age of 24. If today's Jordan could have whispered in the old, you know, the younger Jordan, it would be, take it slow. You don't have to get everything you want today. In fact, if you wait a bit longer for things, they're even that much sweeter. There's an old saying, right, and it's actually, I take this from Zig Ziglar and I've, you know, watched all the stuff from a zillion years ago. He's a great guy, right? And he has this thing and he's an old country boy, right? And he goes, you ever have one of those, your water pumps, you go to a water pump, he goes, you're pumping, you're pumping, you're pumping and you're pumping and nothing's happening. You're pumping, you're pumping and it's hard. You think, what the hell is no water coming out? And then finally you take one pump and the water starts flowing and it doesn't stop. So all the work you were doing, you were actually doing work. And it's productive work, but you're not getting the result. You're pumping, you're pumping. Finally, when the water comes out, it doesn't stop flowing. And the deeper the well, the sweeter the water. And I really believe that. And I've seen it in my own life. I've seen it in the lives of the thousands of people that I mentor. And you know, when you work hard and you finally achieve and you've done it right, there is no better feeling. I run 10, 12 different companies. I stakes in your stakes in different companies. I have, you know, employees all over the world, lots of things going on, lots of problems, so to speak, challenges I face all the time. And you Know what? When I get to bed at night, there is not one thing that I have to worry about, meaning I don't make any decision that I wouldn't want published on the front page of the New York Times. And that's about not taking shortcuts, not playing for the short term, but operating in your own life at the highest ethical standards. So when it seems like all the balls are up in the air, you're like, well, if any one ball falls, you know, I'm not going to be found out. I'm not doing anything wrong. And that's a huge thing because, you know, we do stuff when we're younger. You know, we were once young, Joe. Right. And you do stuff when you're younger, and sometimes you really don't, you know, pace out in the future. The consequences. Absolutely. You want to get rich today, and like I said, I'm a big believer that you have to get rich quick. But there's work to be done between here and there, between where you are now and riches. It starts with getting yourself educated by learning the skills you have to learn and then going out there and taking action and being wrong sometimes and then trying again and being wrong again, failing elegantly so it doesn't hurt you, and you maximize on the lessons, and eventually you take enough shots at something and you have your skills in place, that one spark hits, and that's it, you're rich. Awesome.

Well, you know, one thing I admire about you is having spent a good quantity of time with you in the last week. You have certainly done a tremendous amount of personal development. You've read a lot. You've really, you know, I mean, your time in jail. I mean, you really went out there and just have absorbed so much stuff, and. And we've had conversations about what you're doing in Africa to raise money. And so everything that I've seen the.

New Jordan do is pretty cool.

And so thank you for taking the time to talk about it. Wolf of Wall Street. Read the book. Very entertaining. Totally look forward to seeing the movie when it comes out. So thank you, man.

Couple of curses in there, so.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Seriously offended.

Wrong book. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.

So I hope you found that interview interesting and valuable. I do a lot of interviews. I do it under the Genius Network brand. I also have a podcast on iTunes called ilovemarketing.com where we've interviewed everyone from Richard Branson to Tony Robbins to Blake Mykowski, from Tom Shoes to all kinds of interesting entrepreneurs. It's free. You don't need to buy anything. And if you want to learn more about different aspects of your business, including special interviews with people like Dean Ornish and Tony Horton from P90X and things related to health, there's all kinds of special interviews on brain health from Dr. Daniel Amen, you name it. Go to ilovemarketing.com you can also subscribe on itunes and you can learn a heck of a lot more about different ways to build and grow your business and improve your lives. And if you want training on growing your business 10 times, we do a podcast for the Affluent, which is@10xtalk.com that I do with Dan Sullivan, who has coached more successful entrepreneurs than anyone else in the world and founded a company called Strategic Coach. So I hope you find that valuable and I'd love to hear your comments. Take care.