Arnold Schwarzenegger
speaker
350 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 22 May
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then the way he was like going from bar to bar with his hands, he had this unbelievable power. It was like a monkey. And so he was doing things in the kind of lifts, I mean think about, the guy lifted like 750 pounds deadlift and he weighed like 180 pounds. It's ridiculous. And doing like with 100 pound lateral raises and stuff like that that I used for dumbbell presses.
Barely could do that with 100 pounds. And he would do lateral raises. I mean it's just crazy, crazy strength. And Franco came from Sardinia and the way he grew up was kind of like also very primitive out in the farm and he was like on a ranch and he had to go and take the sheep up to the mountains and he had to figure out himself how to go and feed himself. while he's up there for a few days.
So he had to kill animals and live like a really primitive kind of a thing. And so it was like all kind of very strange, but it made him kind of like a person that had no fear of anything. And so when I brought him to America, I tried to, Joe Weider brought me over to America first because I was like the big bodybuilder. I weighed 250 pounds. I just won Mr. Universe for the second time.
I was 21 years old. I'm this new sensation. You know, this farm boy from Austria. Let's call him the Austrian Oak to create a little bit of drama type of thing. But then Franco was a little guy. but powerful and just thick. And so I had to convince Joe Weider, I said, you got to bring over Franco too. We're a perfect team. It was like the original twins type of thing, right?
And so Franco, Joe Weider would always say, nah, he's a little guy, come on. Why do you want to bring him over? We have so many little guys around here, you know. This is the way he talked, you know, with his Canadian Jewish accent. And so I said, no, you've got to bring Franco over. He's like, there's no one here in America, I can guarantee you, that's like Franco. I said, he can outlift anybody.
He can outpose anyone. And he's going to win Mr. Universe, I guarantee you, that he's on his way to win everything. And then Joe Vita eventually brought him over. And so Franco and I, we then continued training together here. And within one year of being here, he won the Mr. Universe contest in the amateur category.
The year after that, he won the Mr. Universe professional, then Mr. World, eventually Mr. Olympia and all that stuff. And Franco was the kind of a guy that... Because there was no money in bodybuilding. Yeah. So Frank and I, we were just saying, hey, we're from Europe. We're not one of those lazy fucks that just want to hang around and do nothing.
I said, let's get our act together and just let's educate ourselves. Let's go to college, educate ourselves. So Frank loved, of course, chiropractic and medical stuff. So he went to chiropractic college. I went to study business. And on the side, we started working. And Franco, of course, was a bricklayer and a masonry worker and cement worker and stone worker from Italy.
So I said, Franco, we should start a business here. And then, of course, we put an ad in the LA Times, Italian and European masonry work experts and all of this shit. I didn't know anything about masonry work. So we put the ad in. The next day after the ad came out, we had the earthquake in Los Angeles. I mean, can you think about that?
And then, all of a sudden, everyone called us, and they said, oh my God, you gotta come over, you gotta rebuild our chimney, you gotta rebuild our patio, the patio has a big crack here, the wall has a big crack, the wall around the house fell down, and blah, blah, blah. So Franco and I, we were doing bits left and right, and going around.
Yeah, there's a famous wall down in Venice, not far from here, that Franco and I, that was one of the first walls that we built, that's still standing exactly the way it was. Why don't you reopen that business? More than 50 years ago, this wall was built, and it's still standing there, not moved an inch, nothing changed. It's going to be like the Roman walls. Yeah.
It's going to be there for thousands of years, except someone tears it down. So our workmanship was good, but I learned everything from Franco. Franco would go in here, the Mustang, and he would pick up a wheelbarrow, and he would pick up a cement mixer, one of those little machines, and he would just tow it to the construction site, and then I would be in charge of mixing the cement.
He would show me what the combination is, how much water, how much sand, how much... sand and water and all this concrete that we put in there and then mix it up and then help him with that. And then he taught me how to do the bricklaying and all those things. And so we made money. We made $5,000 together. A week. I mean, imagine, it's a lot of money. $75,000, I mean, it was like a lot of money.
So we put literally $1,000 or $1,500 aside. And I started saving up money like that. And that's how I eventually, in 1974, had enough money to put down $27,000 for an apartment building. In Santa Monica? In Santa Monica, yeah. A six-unit apartment building on 19th Street in Santa Monica.
No, I think it was the kind of thing as an immigrant. If you were an immigrant that had its act together and he was willing to work and not live off the state or the country or something like that, we were kind of like... I had a friend who was a Czechoslovakian immigrant, then another guy that was a Polish immigrant.
Every one of them had a little kind of one had a kind of like a twin unit apartment building with just two units. Another one had like eight units. Another one had six units. So they talked me into this. I don't buy a house.
You got to buy apartment building because that gives you money and you can then pay it off with the rent that the people are paying and the value goes up much more than the house and blah, blah, blah. And so then they got a real estate agent that all of them used, which was a Lebanese woman. Olga was her name. And she was like this little. It was like Danny DeVito height.
And she also was an immigrant. So I think that she knew that we were hardworking and that we wanted to invest our money and we wanted to make our money $1 turn into $2. And so she helped us find those apartment buildings. They were available. So she found me one that cost $240,000. Wow. And so I had $27,000 to put down. Then he did $37,000 down. So Joe Weider gave me $10,000 for the third deed.
So he put up that $10,000. So I paid him back within a year. So now this was my building and he didn't have anything to do with it anymore. And then a year later sold it for almost $400,000. So, I mean, imagine by putting $27,000 to $37,000 down, altogether I went from $240,000 to $400,000. Wow. $160,000 profit. In a year? In two years, basically. And then they deducted real estate fee.
It was the best return that you can think. But I didn't take the money because I didn't want to pay the income tax at this point. So I did trading up. Trading up, exactly, to a 12-unit apartment building, then eventually to a 36-unit apartment building, and to a 48-unit apartment. So then it started growing, and then it started getting into...
Showing 181–200 of 350 · page 10 of 18
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