billion now, that s for sure. you went down to australia, on your very first day in 1987, literally the first day you re there, the company that you re working for goes bust in the great crash which happened that day? well, not i went down there, it s even worse than that, i went down there and i trained for six months while the market was soaring to the very top. you re thinking this is i m thinking, this is it. my first day of being a broker, and just like that it s black monday and it s over. when you say over. didn t the firm well, yes, the thing is worse than that, if you remember back then, the attitude was like, people thought it was the next great depression, no one knew the economy would bounce back, people thought it was going to be 1933 all over again. on the subway ride home, the gloom and doom, i was absolutely devastated. when i was working and i was broke, and that was i had no money, i was working for $100 a week, and it was costing me more than that
tweeted me with your views, it looks like he really misses his old life. do you? no. listen, again, there s some aspects of the camaraderie in the early years when it first started year one, it was pure, it was beautiful. we invented a system for training salesmen, we were trying to make our clients money, that was great, i loved that. it spiraled out of control everything that happened. i don t miss that, especially the drugs, i ve been sober now for 17 years, i almost died because of the addiction. i think people mistake that for me being happy about it, i don t miss that life. there s a few saying that he looks like he s glorying into what happened. not glorying for sure. how would you categorize it? a bit of embarrassment. pit putting on a brave face,
savings. a retired dentist lost $250,000. one victim lost $130,000, he told the telegraph enough this. his depiction of the movie is annoying and disturbing, because it makes him into a more mythical figure. what he was about was harming people financially. i think the movie clearly painting that picture. that s accurate, isn t it? what? that you were deliberately? 1992, what did i say? i agree. you picked probably the highlight of what i considered to be the most depraved year of my life. you don t think thousands of people lost their money? some of them did. i don t know anyone who lost their life savings. but let s just be ache rat. how do you feel about these people losing a lot of money. on a human level have you ever met any of them? have you ever met one of your victims? i have not. why not? no one has sought me out. why haven t you sought them out?
the problem with that, we had all these young guys, everyone was 18 to 23, and all the young girls and everyone s making a lot of money and there s a lot of drugs going around, i don t think it takes much of a leap of imagination to figure out what happened next. it started with the elevator, and we christened the elevator early on. i look back at it now and i can scratch my head, that i was instigating it in a way, not that i was responsible for all of it, by being the leader, it becomes a reflection of what i was at the time. i take responsibility for, even though i wasn t there for a lot of it. your number two ate a goldfish that belonged to an employee. did that happen? it happened. you saw it happen?