In one week, I went from being a girl who owed a guy thousands of dollars – my manager Anthony was paying for my outfits, paying for my food; I was sleeping in his parents’ basement – to taking meetings with every major label in America. The next morning, I had a record deal and wrote him a cheque to pay back all that money.
I grew up hearing stories about how my maternal grandfather had put himself through engineering school in New York City. He saved money by walking down to a gas station once a week to take a shower. When I applied to college, both education and investment value were important to me.
Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.
I’ve spent a lot on clothes. I’m not kidding when I say I could have bought several country homes with the money. I’ve also given a lot away over time. I had a lovely Yves Saint Laurent jacket that I’d only worn once or twice, but I’m one for spring cleaning rather than storing my clothes.
When I was 23, 24, I started covering hedge funds – a lot of this was luck – when no one else did. This was before hedge funds were the prettiest girl in school: this was pre-nose job and treadmill for hedge funds, when nobody talked to them – back then, it was just all about insurance companies and money managers.
There’s book smart, there is street smart, there’s relationship smart, there’s too many different kinds of smarts to know all of them. Everybody doesn’t know every kind of smart. There’s money smart, there’s movie smart, there’s computer smart. There’s just too many different kinds of smarts for people to know all the smarts.
It would be nice to make a movie that other people want to make, because every one of these movies, I basically have to find the only company in the world that’s willing to make it, and it’s always a big challenge. I end up spending a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to get money to make these movies and it’s exhausting.
For me, success isn’t even about money. It’s about getting to do what you love and supporting yourself. Everything that comes after that is bonus, unless your only goal is to be rich. If that’s your goal, you’re going to find out that once you have a little bit, you want a lot. Then once you have a lot, you want a lot more.
In fiction film, there are so many trappings – money, glory, champagne and supermodels – that attract the wolves. But in documentary film, there’s none of that, so the wolves stay away. The only people who make docs are people who are curious about other people and just like making documentaries.
At a time when special interest money is being showered on legislators in Washington, grassroots donors offer members of Congress a refreshing independence. The $25 and $50 donor is not looking for special favors. He or she is simply expecting their Congressman to go do the right thing.
The most astonishing subset of the Deep Web is a collection of dark alleys called the Dark Web. The Dark Web is generally thought of as a collection of criminal elements intent on subverting the law, stealing our money, and possibly kidnapping our daughters.
The first thing I heard when I got in the business – not from my mentor – was, ‘Bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered.’ I’m here to tell you I was a pig. And I strongly believe the only way to make long-term returns in our business that are superior is by being a pig.
I went to Dartmouth College, graduated, and had the opportunity to play two professional sports – I played for the New England Patriots in the NFL and professional lacrosse for the Boston Blazers. I had an injury, so I had to stop so I could heal. But when I was playing football, I wasn’t making a lot of money; I wasn’t a superstar.
I wouldn’t mind spending a little more time and effort and money on good skin care. And I’m sure they’ll come out with, as they are doing, with more and more treatments that are noninvasive and healthy ways to keep your face looking as good as it can.
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.
I made a lot of money. I earned a lot of money with CNN and satellite and cable television. And you can’t really spend large sums of money, intelligently, on buying things. So I thought the best thing I could do was put some of that money back to work – making an investment in the future of humanity.
President Obama has outsourced a major portion of the U.S. space program to the Russians. That’s national policy. Taxpayer money. So let’s stop playing games with this outsourcing distortion and talk about the fact that when we need is a president that knows how to manage big enterprise and create jobs.
Minimum wage law is the ‘People’s Fed.’ Tie minimum wage to money supply. If there is pushback against this idea, then shut down the Fed and its ability to distort the economy, penalizing labor, or make the Fed’s distortions available to all businesses and all workers.
The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs.
I call crony capitalism, where you take money from successful small businesses, spend it in Washington on favored industries, on favored individuals, picking winners and losers in the economy, that’s not pro-growth economics. That’s not entrepreneurial economics. That’s not helping small businesses. That’s cronyism, that’s corporate welfare.
Money is not a motivating factor. Money doesn’t thrill me or make me play better because there are benefits to being wealthy. I’m just happy with a ball at my feet. My motivation comes from playing the game I love. If I wasn’t paid to be a professional footballer I would willingly play for nothing.
I’ve gathered some of my close musical and comedian friends, and we’re going to see if we can’t bring a few laughs to these soldiers, raise some money, and hopefully lift their spirits. I consider it an honor and a privilege to give back however I can for the many sacrifices of these incredibly brave men and women.
I’m out there every night working my butt off trying to do what I do, and that is entertain every single person that paid their hard earned money for a ticket. So I think people realize that and I think over time, I feel like that’s grown, definitely.
On the Left, the best and brightest go into politics – Barack Obama is the epitome of the perfect leftist. On the Right, the best and brightest go make money. Very few conservatives want to endure all the nonsense you have to put up with to run for office.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that’s a stable field that the government can’t destroy and can’t distort. Because its creation is governed by the laws of mathematics. It can’t happen any faster or slower than a certain rate, and it all sort of self-adjusts.
