Instagram King, womaniser and wannabe cannabis multibillionaire: we spend a day with Dan Bilzerian (2024)

It’s early afternoon in the hills of Bel Air, California – or just before breakfast, international playboy time (IPT) – and my interview with Instagram king, ultra-stakes poker player, gun collector, womaniser, bodybuilder and now wannabe cannabis multibillionaire Dan Bilzerian is not going brilliantly.

And by not going brilliantly, I mean the interview theoretically began ten minutes ago but I have yet to make it beyond the security booth at the foot of his driveway, where a polite young man with an iPad insists that I sign a “non-disclosure agreement” before going any farther.

This seems like a simple misunderstanding – I’m here to conduct a magazine interview, after all – so I’m less taken aback by the holdup than I am by the sheer spectacle of Bilzerian’s abode.

Picture a whole mountain with a Heathrow-sized international arrivals hall on top of it and you’ve got the idea. Only it’s much bigger and flashier than that. The internet informs me that the newly built property was originally listed for sale at $100 million (£80m) or to rent for a much more reasonable $350,000 (£280,000) per month. Amenities include 12 bedrooms, 24 bathrooms, five bars, a putting green with a “50-foot fire feature” and a 14-car garage with viewing turntables.

It is precisely such oligarch-grade extravagance that has turned Bilzerian into a social media phenomenon, of course – along with the barely dressed females with whom he surrounds himself, his penchant for extreme weaponry, and stunts that once saw him arrested on two felony bomb-making charges. (His lawyers got these downgraded to a no-contest misdemeanour plea.)

And that’s before we get to the backstory of Bilzerian’s notorious Eighties corporate raider father – who went to prison twice then exiled himself to the West Indies, where he avoided paying a $62m (£49m) fine – or the Instagram star’s involvement in the notorious Hollywood poker scandal that ensnared Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire and inspired the film Molly’s Game. Or indeed the fact that Bilzerian also managed to find himself on stage at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas when Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 58 people.

In another era, a convention-flouting lunatic such as Bilzerian would have been a Hunter S Thompson-style outcast, tormenting all decent, God-fearing folk from the fringes of society.

But this is 2019, when the lunatics have not only taken over the asylum, but convinced us all to live in it – while paying them with our likes. Hence Bilzerian has around 42m followers across all social media platforms, a greater reach than many major US television networks.

Back at Bilzerian’s security post, the guard is showing no inclination whatsoever towards letting me in. All first-time visitors must sign the non-disclosure agreement, he explains. I point out that my job today, the very purpose of a magazine interview, is to disclose. Would Bilzerian ask a plumber to sign a non-plumbing agreement before letting him in to unblock a drain?

I’m told to reverse my car into a waiting area. A lawyer will be summoned. She’s coming from Century City, 20 minutes away.

Time passes. I switch off the engine; open the windows to better admire the homes of Bilzerian’s closest neighbours, who include Tesla’s Elon Musk. Several lurid-hued sports cars come and go. I wait some more. Finally, a publicity man emerges to apologise for the misunderstanding.

Everyone else signs the contract, he explains, in a helpful tone.

'I think I’m pretty misunderstood. People are like, ‘Wow, I thought you were going to be a total douchebag'

At last, I’m informed that “Dan” would like to speak to me about the situation in person. As the massive double-driveway gates open, I steer my car up the mountainside to the 70-car motor court above. There must be about £5m-worth of exotic metal up here, I marvel. Bilzerian’s chrome 427 Shelby Cobra alone – 1965 vintage – is worth £1.5m.

As for the man himself, he’s an unmissable, albeit compact, presence.

Navy Seal beard. Luminous athleisurewear. Humongous white (platform?) trainers. His legs are most striking – as though two towers of pebbles have been shrink-wrapped in brown Cellophane. You could count the man’s fat cells on one hand.

I get out of the car and find myself shaking hands with him on a black outdoor rug emblazoned with a gigantic goat logo. (It’s Bilzerian’s pet goat, Zeus, who lives at his other home, in Las Vegas, with his three-legged rescue-cat, Smushball.)

Bilzerian is relaxed, confident but not co*cky, surprisingly warm. Thankfully, he also doesn’t appear to be armed. He explains that the contract is no big deal. I just have to sign it. I apologise for not signing it, but reiterate that I’m really not going to sign it. Phone calls are made. I make an excruciating attempt at smalltalk by asking Bilzerian if he’s renting – but he informs me that he signed his own NDA with the developer of the property so he couldn’t possibly comment. (See? Everyone signs them. Totally normal, man.)

With that, Bilzerian exits and I’m left with the person I assume is his lawyer. After some more back and forth, during which it becomes clear that neither of us is going to back down, I finally lose my patience and get back in the car – although my curiosity about Bilzerian is such that I waver, wondering if I should just sign the bloody thing and be done with it. But no. Although I’m all in favour of new experiences, entering into a legally binding contract with Dan Bilzerian isn’t one of them. The interview’s a bust.

On the way home, a colleague – female, early twenties, American – sends me a link to a song by the rapper T-Pain. The song is entitled “Dan Bilzerian”. It was her college anthem, she says. I play it on Spotify as I drive. “Bitch, I’m rich as f*ck / Bitch, I’m rich as f*ck,” goes the feel-good refrain.

Back in the office, I feel deflated. And as I sit down at my computer to work, I wonder just how much better the rest of Bilzerian’s day will be than mine. Significantly better, I’d wager.

Ping! It’s a text from the publicity guy. I no longer have to sign the agreement – just as long as I interview Bilzerian in his driveway.

So as to not technically enter his house.

Oh, for God’s...

I’m sprinting back to the car.

An hour or so later, I’m sitting on a dining chair in Bilzerian’s driveway – you could land a 747 on it – with his Shelby Cobra parked in the garage behind me on the viewing turntable.

Bilzerian has yet to descend from his ultra mansion in the high-speed elevator to fill the chair next to me. I count perhaps a dozen of his employees standing around, watching – including Jim McCormick, the former head of British American Tobacco who now runs the Instagram star’s cannabis business – while a heroically unflustered GQ film crew prepares to capture the proceedings.

Given that everyone was present for the blowup over the NDA that resulted in my departure then return – not to mention this suboptimal interview location – it’s a little awkward.

The official purpose of today’s interview, it should be noted, is the imminent UK debut of Bilzerian’s cannabis company, Ignite International Brands, Ltd, which recently completed a so-called “reverse merger” with a publicly listed Canadian gold-mining group, meaning you can now bet your pension fund on the King Of Instagram’s ability to diversify from nakedness and guns to weed. So far the ride for investors has been, well... not dull. Since its public stock offering in May, the company – which is traded in Toronto under the symbol BILZ – has, at the time of writing, lost tens of millions of dollars in value. To be fair, it’s an obscure, lightly traded stock and thus prone to volatility. And it’s early days.

Ignite’s initial UK product line will be cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive cannabis extract with multiple claimed medicinal uses, from treating anxiety to acne. You can vape it, take it as a pill, rub it on as a cream, put it in your coffee... a marketeer’s dream. And unlike the kind of medicinal cannabis that gets you high – tightly regulated by the NHS – the sale and use of CBD is absolutely, totally legal-ish.

But I sense there’s another reason for Bilzerian agreeing to talk to GQ today.

After his sometimes grotesquely provocative rise to fame, the Instagram star, who turns 40 next year, is perhaps finally craving respectability. Which would be quite an achievement for a man who celebrated International Women’s Day in 2017 by posting a picture of himself in a hot tub with five near-naked women, casually eating his dinner off one of their backs. “It’s National Women’s Day. Be thankful. They are good for so many things!” read his caption.

'I’ve got so many guns, I couldn’t even count ’em all'

“I think I’m pretty misunderstood,” explains Bilzerian, when he finally joins me in the NDA-free zone of his driveway, his photo shoot with several towering models concluded. “I think a lot of people expect me to be a real asshole. That’s a common one. People are like, ‘Wow, I thought you were going to be a total douchebag.’ And I’m like, ‘Why did you come to my house then?’ And they’re like, ‘No, no. You’re not like that at all.’ And I’m like, ‘I know!’”

I point out, delicately, that he has rather encouraged this view at times. (For example, by previously having “asshole” as his Twitter bio.) “Yeah... I suppose that’s fair,” he responds. “I’ve also been guilty of seeing someone online and judging them, then I met them in person and found out that they’re completely different. That’s happened more than the opposite.”

So far, I have to confess, Bilzerian is indeed surprisingly easy company – not a high bar to pass, admittedly, given the expectations set by our initial legal tussle. But is he really maturing?

“It’s a progression,” he replies. “I wasn’t going to be that crazy party guy forever. Initially, my focus was the military. [He was a Navy Seal trainee.] Then it was college and women. Then it was gambling and women. And then it was... women. And now it’s more business.”

He pauses, thinks.

“And, y’know... women also.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, Bilzerian is single, although he did recently try monogamy – reportedly with bikini model Sofia Bevarly, 16 years his junior – for a while. He says they broke up after a friend bet him $600,000 (£478,000) he couldn’t go a year without sleeping with her. He won. “She took it as a slap in the face,” he reports, sadly. “I ended up giving her ten per cent.”

In spite of such antics, and the 38 women arriving tomorrow – “Some are staying here, some I’m dating. It’s a mix” – Bilzerian has undeniably been toning things down over recent years, thanks in part to Instagram’s no-nudity policy.

But it’s the latest change to his lifestyle that’s been the most shocking – and not one he has made willingly. “The government has taken the stance that if you’re involved in cannabis, you’re not allowed to own a gun,” he reveals, heavily, adding that the police department in Las Vegas informed him of this policy with a notice revoking his CCW (carrying a concealed weapon permit). His weapons are now being stored “off site” by a firearms dealer.

“I was a four-year military veteran with honourable discharge, four years active, four years inactive, then I was a cop for four years – and I can’t own a gun, with no felonies?” he snorts. “That’s absurd to me. For smoking a plant!”

(When Bilzerian says he was a cop, incidentally, he means he obtained credentials from the town of Lake Arthur, New Mexico – population 430 – which for years sold membership of its “all-reserve” force to various gun enthusiasts, billionaires and celebrities. The scheme has since been shut down and the police chief ousted, thanks in part to Bilzerian trying to use his badge to borrow an officer’s gun during the Las Vegas mass shooting, on which more later...)

As for exactly how many weapons Bilzerian has had to mothball, it’s anyone’s guess. “Ah, I don’t even know, man,” he admits. “I’ve got so many guns, I couldn’t even count ’em all.”

Predictably, even the new, friendlier, gun-free Bilzerian has already ruffled beanies in the mellow (and woke) cannabis community. Earlier this year, for example, Ignite put up a gigantic building-graphic advertisem*nt in East Hollywood showing a female model in her underwear feeding grass to a goat. The headline, placed strategically above the woman’s buttocks, was “Nice Grass”. Because grass sounds like ass... and also means cannabis.

Not subtle, no.

One female cannabis entrepreneur spoke out to say that Ignite was “digging its own grave” by alienating female consumers – although there seems to be no shortage of women who follow Bilzerian’s Instagram feed and want to take part in it. (One can only imagine the kind of NDAs they must sign.)

“I mean, look, there are Tom Ford ads where there’s a girl sitting there butt-naked and she’s got a cologne bottle and it’s the only thing covering her vagin*,” counters Bilzerian. “But that’s high fashion, so it’s OK. It’s all bullsh*t, man. I don’t listen to any of that nonsense. We had some girls and I think they were in Calvin Klein activewear – something you could wear to the gym, for God’s sake – and one of them is holding a goat. That’s so PG, man! I just said: let’s do something funny that has nothing to do with cannabis, something that will catch people’s attention and make them stop and say, ‘What is this? What is Ignite?’”

Perhaps a more interesting question, however, is “What is Dan Bilzerian?”

Especially as he hews ever closer to the mainstream.

When he tells me that, “Part of the brand that I’ve built is having the women and having the freedom, not really conforming to regular society guidelines, doing what makes you happy, regardless of what people think that you should be doing,” he sounds disappointingly like a self-satisfied baby boomer, a throwback tool of the patriarchy, you might say – emphasis on tool – like his hero, Hugh Hefner.

'For the most part, I feel like I’ve been a pretty steady, consistent, normal guy, surrounded by maniacs in crazy situations'

To Bilzerian’s 42m followers, however – most of them too young to know or care much about Great-Grandpa Hef – I suspect he seems more aligned with Mark Manson’s self-empowerment bestseller The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck, which arrived three years ago as a badly needed antidote to crushing US political correctness. Indeed, when I ask my early-twenties female colleague what she thinks of Bilzerian, she says that his sexism is laughable, not offensive, adding that girls who pose with him are as desperate for attention as he is. Besides, she adds, a woman could easily have a feed with naked, submissive men, overtones of misandry and the same core message. That message being, essentially: f*ck you.

Which brings us to the question of authenticity.

There is a theory online that Bilzerian is a kind of social media Wizard Of Oz – a small-time trust-fund baby who has paid and faked his way into looking like a much bigger deal than he is. His jet, for example, is said to be a junker. And public records suggest he rents the home we’re sitting in the driveway of. It’s unlikely he bought it for $100m.

But this is all surely beside the point. Because it’s the very mystery of how Dan Bilzerian came to be Dan Bilzerian – and the insanity of the biographical details that have thus far been verified – that make so many people want to follow him.

Besides, reality seems so last century. The feed is all that counts.

“I wasn’t born with any of this stuff,” Bilzerian tells me, looking around, when I dig for details of his early life in Tampa, Florida. “Then my dad made a ton of money and we got the house, which I think was the biggest in the state of Florida.”

The “we” included his younger brother, Adam, and his mother, Terri.

“So now our neighbour’s got the Rolls-Royce, the gold watch, the hot chicks, the cigarette boat – but my dad’s driving around in a Jeep. He just didn’t give a sh*t. For him, it was more about the power and the control. He never spent his money, didn’t really care about it. So when I made my money, I thought, 'I’ll buy all the stuff that I want.'”

Before we address that critical word – “made”, with regards to Bilzerian’s money – it’s worth pausing a moment to consider what it was like growing up with a father like Bilzerian Sr.

A financier of Armenian descent with a near-genius-level IQ and a used-car salesman’s moustache, Paul Bilzerian was, by most accounts, stubborn, obsessive, prone to grudges and didn’t know when to stop. At one point, ludicrously, he sued his son’s Little League baseball team for slander, only for the case later to be dismissed.

“My relationship with my dad was a little rocky, sure,” confirms Bilzerian, quietly. “The time that I spent with him was basically two hours of Little League practice, six or seven days a week, from the age of five until whenever. If we lost, there was no talking the whole way home. But that seemed normal to me. Later on in life, I realised he was kind of an odd duck and probably a bad parent.”

'Normally, I always had a machine gun in my car and a bulletproof vest'

Not long after Bilzerian Sr struck it rich, his high-stakes bets on publicly traded companies landed him in jail for “stock parking”, an elaborate, legally fuzzy way of manipulating share prices by making it seem like a takeover bid is imminent.

The prosecutor of the case was none other than Rudy Giuliani, later to become mayor of New York City and advisor to President Donald J Trump. “When my dad got sentenced, all the kids in my class knew about it and I didn’t,” recalls Bilzerian, who was about eight years old at the time. “He didn’t tell me until we were driving into school that day, because he thought he was going to win his appeal.”

It was the beginning of a rough period for Bilzerian, who proceeded to get expelled from two schools in one year, ending up in a military academy. After that, the family relocated to Utah, where Bilzerian Sr, now out on parole, became president of a software company in which he is believed to have a bought a stake. But the US government wasn’t done with Bilzerian's father, taking civil action to get back what it said were his ill-gotten gains. Though he had filed for bankruptcy, he was given a $62m (£49m) fine and kept up the fight for the next 20 years, grinding down the government’s lawyers until they gave up, with one bankruptcy trustee in the case telling the Wall Street Journal that Bilzerian Sr was “a little smarter than those who were trying to pursue him".

Bilzerian went on to train as a Navy Seal, but didn’t get beyond the notoriously brutal basic underwater demolition/Seal training course, known as Bud/s.

Complicating matters, Bilzerian was mid-Bud/s when his father got thrown back in prison for evading his fine. “I had to sign over a third of my trust fund to get him out,” he says. “They basically held him hostage. The whole thing was so crazy. He didn’t talk to me for a while [for giving the government money], he was really pissed. And I get it. His whole thing was [that] they were wrong and f*ck you, but when they told me that they were going to throw my mom in jail and they weren’t going to let him out unless I signed, I mean, I didn’t really care about a third of the trust that didn’t kick in until I was 35 anyway. I was like, 'f*ck it.'”

Bilzerian Sr has since moved to St Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies, having, according to his son, renounced his US citizenship in protest.

When I ask Bilzerian how things are with his father now, he says they’re closer than before. “He just doesn’t think like normal people,” he says, shrugging. “I think most successful people don’t really follow those kind of normal thought processes and that’s why they’re not doing what most people do. I mean, I’ve met a lot of guys who are super, super smart, but have terrible judgement in some areas. They’re so smart they think it carries over, and they’ve been right before when a lot of other people have been wrong, so when people tell them, ‘Hey, you’re wrong,’ they just ignore it.”

Bilzerian could almost be taking about himself – his blind spot being an inability to tell when the nihilistic swagger of his Instagram feed crosses the line into misogyny – but it’s a measure of how sane he seems in person that I find myself nodding along.

“I’ve always said I think I’m a totally normal guy,” he tells me. “My whole life, it’s been like that. Actually, I take that back. I was kind of a crazy asshole when I was younger. But for the most part, I feel like I’ve been a pretty steady, consistent, normal guy, surrounded by maniacs in crazy situations.”

It was after the Navy when Bilzerian was studying business and criminology at the University Of Florida – funded by a $6,000 (£4,800) per month military veteran’s disability allowance – that he learned how to play poker and immediately became addicted to it. This, he insists, is how he “made” his money. Not from the trust funds set up for him by his convicted fraudster father. “That was a common misconception,” he says, “and I never corrected it, because it allowed me to get into these really high stakes private poker games and play with billionaires and have fun gambling. But the truth of the matter is I didn’t get a dollar until I was 35. And when I did get my trust fund, I gave it all to my father and brother anyway. I didn’t take a dollar.”

Virtually none of this is fact-checkable, of course, although Bilzerian was undoubtedly a well-known poker player.

That much was clear from the fact he was named in the lawsuits that flew after the exposure of “nosebleed stakes” Hollywood poker games allegedly involving Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and others. The scandal was that one of the regular players, a wealthy hedge fund owner named Bradley Ruderman, was operating a Ponzi scheme. His ruse was to lose money in the games – making it look like he was so successful he didn’t care – while using those same games to pick up new clients... whose money he would then lose on the games.

“He just seemed like a nice, clueless guy,” says Bilzerian of Ruderman. “There was nothing illegal about the games. There was no rake [house commission], no hookers. When you’re playing for millions of dollars, people are taking it seriously. They’re not in there getting f*cked up, thinking about girls. They’re focused on the game. They want to win.”

Bilzerian’s biggest loss in one night, he claims, was $3.6m (£2.4m). His biggest win: $12.8m (£10.2m).

This was also the time when he realised that he and a group of around 30 male friends could use their money to hire nightclub promoters, who would in turn organise private parties with all-female guest lists and free bars, catering and entertainment, such as manicurists, tarot card readers and the like. With ten women to every man – and everyone having a good time – it wasn’t a challenge to get laid.

Bilzerian has said the girls were using him as much as he was using them. And that seems as true today as it was back then.

'I would attribute [the heart attacks] to the cocaine, the Viagra, the lack of sleep and being sick'

I ask him what it’s like to win $12.8m, 270 times the average US salary, in one night. “That was the tail end of an 18-hour session, last hand. I was all-in for probably a $30m [£24m] pot and the guy I was playing kept me waiting for an hour and a half before he folded,” he recalls, making it sound like not much fun at all. “I went into his bathroom and said, ‘Just tell me when you’ve made your decision. I’m not going to sit here and sweat while you determine whether or not you’re going to call me.’”

Poker took a toll on Bilzerian, he admits, both physically and mentally.

“It hurts you because you really have to mute your emotions,” he says. “If you’re emotional about it, it’s going to f*ck you up. I don’t know if there’s anything worse than a gambling addiction. I think it’s worse than a drug addiction. I think people probably kill themselves more and ruin their lives more from gambling than they do from drugs.”

I ask if poker made him lose respect for money.

“Absolutely. It’s inevitable,” he says. “I guess the best way to describe it is if you’re down $5m and you end up losing only $100,000, you leave that game happy as a clam. But if you’re up $5m then lose it all back and you only win $100,000, you leave that game pissed. It’s a weird thing. A guy could leave a game losing a hundred grand and be ecstatic, and another guy could win a hundred grand and be pissed.”

Bilzerian says he never kicked his gambling habit. He just turned it into a job.

“I found a game that was skill-based – poker – and I realised that if I played against people who I was better than, I would just win money, statistically,” he says. “By the end, I was playing 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and if you do anything long enough you’re going to get sick of it. I actually don’t even like gambling any more.”

The story almost didn’t end happily, however.

When Bilzerian was 25, at the height of his poker career, he suffered two back-to-back heart attacks as a result of his lifestyle – although he says gambling was probably the least of all the aggravating factors. “I would attribute that more to the cocaine, the Viagra, the lack of sleep and being sick and f*cking strippers,” he says. “It was kind of the perfect storm of bad decisions.” He has since had an angiogram, which showed no lasting damage. “I got lucky, for sure.”

The Hollywood poker scandal wasn’t the only international news story in which Bilzerian ended up with a bizarre cameo.

On the night of 1 October 2017, he was in Las Vegas with his friend Jake Owen, the country music star, to attend the latter’s show at the Route 91 Harvest music festival. Afterwards, he stood in the wings to watch Jason Aldean’s set.

Then the gates of hell opened.

“We thought it was gunshots from within the crowd,” says Bilzerian, describing the moment that Stephen Paddock opened fire from his hotel room, using AR-15-type rifles with “bump stock” attachments to make them function essentially as fully automatic machine guns. “So we took off running. And I stopped at a cop car. I just remember trying to get this gun out of the cop car. And thank God I couldn’t get it unlocked, because if I was running around with a shotgun, I would probably have got shot by the cops. It was also a blessing that I didn’t have a gun on me. Normally, I always had a machine gun in my car and a bulletproof vest. You can imagine, if I’m walking around with a bulletproof vest and a machine gun and some cop sees me – game over. At the time, I was so mad: the one time I don’t have a gun this thing happened. But, lo and behold, this guy’s 400 yards up in a hotel room. Nobody had a clue.”

Bilzerian took video throughout. “You can hear the bullets hitting right next to me,” he says of the footage. “Some girl got shot.” (His description at the time was more graphic.)

The performers that night have said they were shaken profoundly by the massacre, the deadliest by a lone shooter in US history. “In the weeks that followed, it was a lot of different emotions... guilt, anger and a lot of other things,” said Aldean in a television interview last year. Owen, meanwhile, said the deaths changed him, “One hundred per cent... I was there with those people. Why wasn’t it me?”

Bilzerian, curiously, seems unable or unwilling to show such vulnerability. When I ask him how the mass shooting affected him, if he suffered from PTSD, he just says, “It was sh*tty.”

But he quickly gets emotional when it comes to the press coverage of his involvement, which initially focused heavily on a marine veteran and Medal Of Honor recipient, Dakota Meyer, who criticised Bilzerian for running away from the massacre while filming. “This is what kills me about people like you,” wrote Meyer. “Always playing ‘[special] operator dress up’ and so tough when the cameras are on. A woman just got shot in the head and you are running away filming. That’s not what operators do.”

Bilzerian remains furious about it. “All these press outlets asked me for interviews, but I didn’t want to do any. Then this one marine who wanted to get famous went online and started talking sh*t, saying that I ran away from the shooting,” he says.

In fact, counters Bilzerian, after trying to get the gun out of the police car, “I ran towards the shooting, asking a cop who was running away if he had a machine gun and a pistol. I showed him my badge, because I was a cop at the time [Lake Arthur reservist], but he wouldn’t do it. Then my buddies were like, ‘The cops are boning out. We gotta get out of here.’ So we left, took three girls to the hospital, came back and helped out doing first responder stuff for an hour and a half.”

Bilzerian isn’t done.

“But because I didn’t post all the video and do the news interviews, the media ran this story, which was, ‘Oh, Dan Bilzerian runs away from a shooting!’ Like that’s even a bad thing, right? You’re supposed to run! The guy’s there shooting at you with a machine gun and if you don’t have a gun and someone’s shooting at you, you run away! So this idiot marine is not only sending the message that you’re not supposed to run when you’re in a mass shooting – I mean, think about how stupid this guy is! – [but] on top of that, I actually didn’t run away! I was there! For the whole time!”

There’s more.

'You’re supposed to run! The guy’s there shooting at you with a machine gun, and if you don’t have a gun and someone’s shooting at you, you run away!'

“The thing that hit me after [as opposed to PTSD] was people talking sh*t, saying, ‘Oh, you’re a coward,’” he continues. “It actually just made me realise what vermin most of the media was, because at the end of the day they just want clickbait. That’s the problem with the media today. They don’t care about what’s the truth or what’s a story. They just want to post what’s going to get them the most clicks.”

At this point, I want to interrupt, but I’m not sure where to start when it comes to Dan Bilzerian railing against clickbait.

I’m also starting to rethink my agreement with him earlier that he comes off as a normal guy. He witnessed 58 people getting ripped to piece by bullets. And this is what he’s upset about.

“And it made me see how fickle and bandwagony our generation is. When one article comes out, they’ll go from, ‘Oh, this guy’s a hero,’ to, ‘This guy’s a piece of sh*t,’” he goes on. “And how easily influenced people are, how much power the media really has – which I think is the one good thing about social media, in that it’s taking away some of that power. I’m bigger than all these [TV news] networks, so I can tell them to go and f*ck themselves and post what actually happened. I’m appreciative of having that voice. I look at some of these TV stations: a good show will get one or two million views, but I’m getting 50, 60 million impressions on one post.”

For the record, Bilzerian says the shooting didn’t change his opinion on America’s notoriously lax guns laws. “Most shootings, if you had one or two armed civilians in there, they could actually stop the shooting,” he says. It's a common argument.

But not in Vegas, I suggest.

“No,” he concedes. “That’s one rare example where if everyone would have had a gun... it would have probably been worse.”

Bilzerian’s tirade against the press might have an overly familiar Trumpian ring to it, but it also confirms my initial suspicions – that he has started to crave more respectability, even legitimacy.

And, perhaps, in the same way that he got tired of poker, he’s getting tired of girls and partying, now that those things have also become a job of sorts. Hence his quest to become an entrepreneur. Bilzerian says it’s more about wanting to do something less selfish.

“I take some pride that I made a ton of money in poker, but not as much as if I’d gone out and made a business. Because every time I made money in poker, someone else had to lose. It’s a zero-sum game,” he says. “But when you build a business and you provide a good service, you’re making money and the person’s getting what they want.”

His grand plan, he says, is for Ignite to become “the first global cannabis, CBD and nicotine brand. We want one device that does all three things – and nobody else is doing that right now.” The company, which sources its raw product from white-label manufacturers, is starting with CBD because, unlike products that contain psychoactive THC, it’s legal across many territories. Although, of course, Ignite already offers cannabis products in California.

Bilzerian is sensitive to the charge that CBD – now offered as an additive to almost everything in LA – is simply a form of snake oil.

“I thought it was complete bullsh*t, I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “But then I was helping this seven-year-old kid and he had leukaemia and he was on heavy opioids, in pain a lot. And he told me that by taking CBD in large doses he was able to get off Oxycontin. This kid wasn’t selling CBD. He had no agenda. So when I heard that, I was just like, ‘Wow.’”

Is he concerned about the effects of cannabis on developing teenage brains? “The problem is they’re just going to do it,” he says with a shrug. “So if they’re going to smoke weed or drink I think it’s probably better they smoke. I mean, it’s obviously better they don’t do any of it, but 16-year-olds are doing ecstasy and cocaine now. When I was a kid, that wasn’t even a thing.” Bilzerian says he was eleven when he first tried cannabis – on a golf course – smoking it through a tin can with holes in it. He was with a friend and they tore around in golf carts, high, and “had a great time”.

'People don’t get high [on cannabis] and go beat people up. They’re more likely to put up with a ton from their wife, as opposed to smacking her'

Interestingly, Bilzerian doesn’t think the prospect of legal weed means the end of alcohol, in spite of falling consumption.

“To me, it’s apples to oranges,” he says. “Alcohol’s got a place. If you want to go to a bar, get some confidence to go talk to a girl. Smoking a joint’s not the answer. But when you overdo it with drinking, it has a ton of health repercussions, not only for you, but for the people around you: drinking and driving, domestic violence. People don’t get high [on cannabis] and go beat the sh*t out of people. They’re more likely to put up with a ton of sh*t from their wife, as opposed to smacking her. It’s an opposite vibe.”

Clearly, with Bilzerian making comments such as these – smoke weed so you don’t smack your wife! – Ignite’s investors are going to need balls of steel. Then again, this is Dan Bilzerian, so any number of other disasters could befall him before he gets tripped up by a mere insensitive choice of words.

Just a few months ago, he visited Armenia with his brother and somehow ended up shooting tanks and rocket launders in a disputed territory – which has landed him on an international most wanted list in neighbouring Azerbaijan. “I had no idea,” he protests when I ask about it. “I didn’t know what territories they own or whatever. It was the first time I’d ever been in that country! It was unfortunate. I definitely cannot go to Azerbaijan now, but I wouldn’t want to go to anyway. I think it’s kind of a sh*thole. And I’m working on getting diplomatic immunity, so I don’t have to deal with that sh*t.”

Regardless of whether Bilzerian turns out to be an asset or liability for Ignite, however, his ambitions by no means end with cannabis.

He also has a pheromone-infused male-grooming product line, branded Alister (“Scientifically proven to attract females”) and a soon-to-launch gambling app. And after he met with President Trump at Trump International Hotel in 2015 – “He knew my dad, so we talked a little bit about my dad, business stuff, gun stuff. He seemed like a pretty laid-back guy, but I don’t really get super into politics” – he is nursing ambitions to one day run for public office. He says he would campaign as an independent on a libertarian platform.

“People have said I was crazy a lot of times along the way,” he tells me, dead serious. “They’ve said, ‘Ah, you’ll never be able to do this, you’ll never be able to do that.’ But I think that I’m going to build a multibillion-dollar business here. And then, when I’m ready, I’ll go and become president.”

Once upon a time, this last part might have raised a laugh.

But all I can think is: please, God, no.

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