Wealth & Money Quote by Al Goldstein

Humiliation is doing all the work here, and Goldstein knows it. He stacks losses the way tabloids stack scandal: furniture, underwear, houses in three glamorous zip codes plus Amsterdam, then the two calamities money can’t buy its way out of. The rhythm is deliberately crude and cumulative, a kind of moral bankruptcy ledger that turns conspicuous consumption into a punchline. Underwear is the key detail: not just repossession, but exposure. The bank doesn’t merely take assets; it strips you of dignity.

Goldstein, a porn publisher who made a career out of mixing bravado with provocation, is also rewriting the mythology of the swaggering American hustler. The fantasy says you can outsmart the system, live loud, and outrun consequence. His list says the system has receipts. The properties named like trophies (Florida, New York, Amsterdam, L.A.) telegraph a certain larger-than-life persona and then instantly deflate it; those places are status symbols until they become coordinates of collapse.

The gut-punch is the pivot from material ruin to intimate abandonment. Wife dying, son leaving: the quote refuses the comforting narrative that personal love stands outside the market’s wreckage. It suggests the opposite: when your public self implodes, your private life can follow, whether through stress, resentment, or sheer exhaustion. The final line, “you don’t feel very good,” is almost comic in its understatement - a deadpan shrug after apocalypse. That flatness isn’t ignorance; it’s a defense mechanism, the last scrap of control from a man whose brand was never to beg for sympathy, even when he’s clearly asking for it.