Jordan Belfort is an extraordinary man.

As a talented, but fatally tainted Wall Street executive, he amassed an obscene amount of wealth by defrauding investors with a successful pump and dump scheme.

But Jordan earned far more than he could ever hope to spend. So much, in fact, that wealth became an arbitrary concept. Elaphantine quantities of drugs, women and egotistical success filled a vacuum of meaning in Belfort’s life.

Belfort’s tale is exemplary of what happens when wealth is acquired too quickly, separating the bank balance from the context of a sweated brow, and then put in the hands of young masculinity.

His exploits have inspired two Hollywood biopics, Boiler Room, starring Ben Affleck, and the more biographical Wolf of Wall Street (the same name of Belfort’s bestselling autobiography), directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo Di Caprio, which has begun shooting.

Since achieving prolonged sobriety and serving the requisite prison time, Jordan Belfort has returned to a life of normalcy. He’ll be arriving in Cape Town at the end of October to present the lessons of entrepreneurship that he gleaned over the course of his wildly successful, and ultimately tragic former life.

2oceansvibe caught up with him via Skype.

Highlights from the interview:

I heard about someone that was making a ton of money down on wall street and I knew them growing up and they weren’t that sharp, and like well, them? Well them? I can do it a lot better than them.

One of the fundamental problems that happens to young stockbrokers and investment bankers is that, because of the nature of the business you’re trading, you’re not creating anything, and you’re buying and selling. So there’s really no feeling of a tangible a job well done. Well hey I have this company, I have this thing. It’s all about the money that you get from it, so what happens is you start to get this desire to attach tangible value to the money. So you start buying shit.

So what happens is you start to getting into this cycle where the only way to express the success of it – and this is not all Wall-Streeters okay, but it happens to a lot of them – and money becomes a scorecard, and when its sitting in your bank account it doesn’t have as much, let’s just say perceived value as when you’re driving a three hundred thousand dollar Ferrari, right? It got the point for me it was like, shit, it was like Monopoly money. I mean, two million dollars in my sock draw, like loose change.

If you would have told me let’s say five years before it all happened, hey you know in five years you’re gonna be doing this, this, this, this, I would have said get the fuck out of here. No way, not a chance under the sun. I’m a good guy, I never broke the law not once in my life, I wasn’t raised that way. But it’s these tiny little steps you take. I took one step over the line, and then I did things right again, but next time I took a step over the line and it moved a bit, and then the next time the line moved further still and further still and further still, and through these tiny imperceptible steps you end up doing things you’d never do, associating with people you’d never associate with, and it all seems normal at the time. Now I look back at it and I was like, I was insane.

Interview (c) 2oceansvibe Media 2010