E315: Why Quantity Beats Quality (Why Van Gogh Proves It)

What if success isn’t about talent… but about multiplying your effort by 10? In this episode, I sit down with Grant Cardone, CEO of Cardone Capital, to break down the mindset behind the 10X Rule, omnipresence in marketing, raising billions from retail investors, and why quantity always precedes quality. Grant shares how he built a $5B real estate portfolio, scaled a media machine that sends hundreds of millions of emails per year, and combined Bitcoin with multifamily real estate to create a new hybrid investment vehicle. We also unpack why most people underestimate effort, why repetition builds self-esteem, and why illiquidity may be the real edge in investing.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This idea that quality is senior to quantity is wrong. Quantity is senior to the quality. It's so arrogant to think that anybody's gonna get one quality painting. I don't know how many pieces Van Gogh did. I think he only sold one piece his whole life. He did hundreds and hundreds of pieces. When we first started doing social media, I was 52 years old. This is 2012. I saw the internet, I saw social media, and I'm like, oh my god, dude, this is, this is, I'm gonna get known.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Grant Cardone, he joins me now. He's the international sales expert and the author of the 10x rule. The only difference between.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  I told my wife, she was an actress. She came back from an audition one day and she was crying. She's like, oh, it was terrible, it was terrible. I'm like, baby, I'm gonna make you famous. I discovered YouTube today. And we're gonna get millions and millions of people to know our name, and you'll never have to do another audition. I didn't see the quality first. We would take a phone, turn it sideways, no lighting. We didn't have the little O-rings. We didn't have Zoom calls. We didn't have setups, dude, nothing. I had an iPhone 4 or something, just one video at a time. I still have that first video up there. I think it had like 85 views over like 13 years. We do this 3-3-2 rule. You call me today, you're interested. I'm calling you three times today, three times tomorrow, and two times on the third day. We know that formula. Now, you're gonna be like, oh my god, bro, don't call me eight times.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna call you eight times.

• 1:23David Weisburd?

  How did you become such a dominant force?

• 1:25Speaker 00

  I became that because I was terrified to be ignored.

• 1:30David Weisburd?

  You created the 10x rule, which says that people underestimate by 10x what it takes to succeed. Why do you think people so systematically underestimate how hard it is to succeed?

• 1:41Speaker 00

  If you underestimate the initial goal, you're gonna underestimate how hard it's gonna be. Like, nobody would ever write a business plan and include COVID. You know, you wouldn't write a business plan and include Madami raising property taxes in New York City. But I just, I was just buying an apartment complex there back in November, and then we're gonna end up with a new mayor that says we're gonna raise property taxes on everybody. Or you go to California and they're gonna, you know, raise the wealth tax and drive billionaires. Who would include that in a business plan? You would never do that, because if you did all that, you would never do anything. So I think the reason people underestimate how hard it's gonna be and how much work it's gonna take is because they go in idealistically saying, I'm gonna call 10 people. Half of them are gonna buy it from me.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Or maybe David, the business is a trillion dollar industry and I'm gonna get 1% of it because it seems like such a tiny number and you're gonna get rich. That's not how it's gonna work. You're probably gonna get point 000001% of that industry. And the people simply underestimate. So the 10x rule was basically like whatever you think, and this is an arbitrary, by the way, completely made up. It's not science. A 10x rule sounds a lot better than a thousand x rule, but it's probably more like a thousand times. If you think you need to call on 10 people, you probably ought to multiply it times 10 and it's gonna be 100. If you think it's gonna be 100, you know, 10x it is gonna be 1,000. It's gonna be harder and it's gonna be better than you ever imagined, by the way. That's the upside of the 10x rule. Okay, whatever you think it, you know, your dream, if when you hit your dream.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  I mean, if it's a real dream, if it's really, really impactful, not only will it be 10 times harder, but it's gonna be 10 times better than you thought.

• 3:14David Weisburd?

  Is this because the schooling system doesn't prepare you? Is it lack of role models? What specifically creates this gulf between how much people think they need to do and how much they actually do?

• 3:22Speaker 00

  You have a seven time better chance of becoming a millionaire in America than you do of having apps. I happen to have both. Okay, so it's because people underestimate everything all the way from our schooling. You know, our parents, you know, we go to, we go to school for 12 years. By the way, that, that was dumb. We had to little check off our little test and get our little A. And then you think you're gonna go into the marketplace and be a success. You're not. They're not even teaching success there. There's no classes on examples of billionaires. Why isn't there? Why, why, why are eighth graders not learning about billionaires or the founders of this country or the wealthiest people on planet earth and how they did it? They don't teach it. They don't teach investing. They don't teach the rule of 72.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  They don't teach compounding like, like there's nothing being taught at a school level. Now AI is gonna change all that. But it's still not going to show you the amount of effort and push. We don't have a rejection course in, in, in school. Why not? Kids should learn how to be rejected and get flat on it. So it doesn't bother them. So they don't, they don't have this go to, I'm an introvert. No, you're not an introvert, dude. You just never spend enough time extroverting. Because any human being can be an introvert and an extrovert. And you've, look, if you had a lot of people on your show, you know, you've had Alex here. He, he would appear to be very extroverted. I know Alex. He's not always extroverted, any more than I am. You know, catch me on a public flight, going across the, you know, flying from Miami to Dubai.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  I'm gonna sit up there. I'm probably not gonna talk to anybody for 11 hours. So I, I think that, that school is just not teaching people how hard it can be. And, and this is the problem in America too. Americans are entitled people.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  And you see it across the spectrum. That's why immigrants do so well in this country. Guy comes here and just scorches America, just like does so well because he's so hungry. One, and number two, and probably his superpower is he has no issues with entitlement. He thinks he deserves nothing. Where Americans take for granted almost everything. They take for granted a 40 hour work week, air conditioned heaters, a car, a garage, days off, President's Day, Christmas, a bonus at Christmas. There's so much bullshit that we take for granted in this country that has made us lazy. And then we pass that on to our kids. You know, why aren't kids going to school on Saturdays and Sundays and getting out in eight years rather than 12?

• 5:45Speaker 00

  They should. I homeschooled both my kids. My first kid was out of high school, just at her 15th birthday.

• 5:52David Weisburd?

  To play devil's advocate, these skills like extroversion, dealing with the rejection, could they really be taught in the classroom?

• 5:58Speaker 00

  100% they can be taught, you know? Here's a phone, here's a phone, raise money for the school, we're raising money for the football team, start calling. Yeah, you can teach rejection. Most painful thing you'll ever learn in your life, by the way, is somebody not answering the phone. Forget them hanging up on you. Forget them not, say, never call me again. I've already given enough money, okay? My kid didn't make the football team. Whatever the kid has to handle, that's nothing compared to them simply not picking up the phone and being ignored. But these are the kind of things that kids could be taught. Like, we do internships here at Cardone Capital, 10x Health Systems, our education company. And we have people intern, we had two kids in this week from a family in Chicago. And I'm like, pick up the phone, make the call. You gotta make 85 phone calls a day.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  The most painful thing is gonna be not what they tell you, but the fact that they never pick up the phone, never answer your phone call, and never call you back. So e- even just being those practical, David, those practical.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Pick up the phone, easy the first time, but on the 12th call and nobody's answered, that phone becomes heavier and heavier. It becomes more and more difficult to literally just be ignored. And I've heard people say this, I don't like that game because of the rejection. The rejection is not the issue. Being ignored as a human being, as a spiritual entity, as a person trying to add value in the marketplace, being ignored is probably the most painful thing. And anybody that's ever done a startup and had a great idea, you know what I mean?

• 7:24David Weisburd?

  I've interviewed eight billionaires, so you're now the ninth billionaire. And one of the things that they all have in common is they have extreme strengths and they also have extreme weaknesses. Have you found that to be the case in the top performers?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  I would agree with that with everybody. Every human being has, you know, you have assets and liabilities and you should know them. And just like you should know your assets.

• 7:42David Weisburd?

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• 8:26David Weisburd?

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• 9:09David Weisburd?

  Check it out for yourself at alphascense.com/HowIInvest.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100%, dude, 100%. I mean, you know. You're gonna go, your kids are going to school. Your kids can't even tell me what assets and liabilities are on financial statement. Not your kids, but I'm just saying the average kid can't because their average parent can't. Their average parent in America will have their home as an asset on their financial statement. When in truth, it's a liability. So if I don't know my personal financial statement, assets and liabilities, how could I possibly know my own? So as a business owner, I have many assets and I have many liabilities.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Also, there's a point in my trajectory in my growth as an entrepreneur and as a business owner and as a person where my assets actually become my liabilities. You know, my confidence, not having confidence is the liability. Having it is an asset, but I can end up with so much confidence that my asset becomes a liability again because it comes off as arrogance. So in fact, I believe all assets at some point in time, as they grow, as you scale them, they become, they become liabilities and all liabilities. Like I tend to not let people finish. Like I hear your question, I want to go, right? So that's cool because it's transparent. Cause I'm not thinking about, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not thinking about what your audience needs to hear.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  You're just going to get the very authentic version of me, but it's a liability because I didn't let you finish, dude. You know, you might not feel good about it. Maybe you didn't finish your whole question and my wife's going to hate it because this is what I do to her all the time.

• 10:43David Weisburd?

  Speaking of language, you use words like dominate when you talk about capturing market share. Tell me about your language.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  You have some great questions, man. I got to tell you, I've done a lot of interviews. Appreciate your curiosity of the subject and what drives a person like curiosity is so important. Look, I just know from marketing. I grew up in a time, I grew up in one, without any money. And two, I grew up in a time where the only marketing you could get was to buy ads. There was three channels as newspapers, billboards, maybe, and TV and radio. And I didn't have any money. If you don't have any money and the only way to get your message out is to, you know, buy an ad or direct mail, you had to fund it, right? So now here, fast forward.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Here we are today in Instagram and Tik Tok and you don't need money now to market. But if you market once. If I market today and don't market tomorrow, the world, the world will know me today and forget me tomorrow. So the only way you have to dominate. Sirhan, you've had him on, Ryan, you've had on the show. All these guys are doing a great job of dominating their space. They're number one. I wrote a book called If You're Not First, You're Last. And that book is not a, it wasn't a Ricky Bobby book. Okay. Which by the way, I didn't know about until I wrote the book and everybody's like, you're knocking off Ricky Bobby. I'm like, I didn't even know who Ricky Bobby was, even though I'm from the South. If you're not first, you're last was really about, you have to be first on the mind of the consumer. The consumer does not buy the best product ever.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  The consumer buys the best known product. The perceived illusion of what's best or what's most known. Power tends to be assigned to that thing that's most omnipresent.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  So whatever bank is most omnipresent in your marketplace is the most trusted bank. If it's Wells Fargo. And you see them on every street corner, it's the most trusted. If it's the Starbucks, Starbucks does not spend any money in advertising. But they'll have locations that are very concentrated. So you're going to move every six blocks where there's. A lot of free money, a lot of easy money to get, you know, where there's. You know, people have an extra $8. You're going to see a Starbucks, a Starbucks. Go to New York City, you'll see one on every, you could see one on the corner of every block of one block. Because they're seeking dominance and omnipresence. And they're also trying to hit you knowing, hey, if you walk another block, you're going to see this again, even though you rejected the first store, the second store, boom, third store, you're buying a coffee that you didn't even need.

• 13:13David Weisburd?

  It's the rule of seven, which is you need to see something seven times before you buy. Unpack that a little bit more, this perceived illusion. What are the components of that? How did you become such a dominant force? Break that down.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Well, I became a, if I'm a dominant force, I became that because I was terrified. To be ignored. I was terrified of being ignored. And I had these good ideas. My whole career, I come up with these good ideas every like eight or 10 years. And then you got to push a new idea into the marketplace and nobody wants to hear it like. And nobody's going to hear it because nobody's thinking about your great idea. Look, Jesus was ignored. I mean, Muhammad Ali was ignored. Donald Trump was definitely ignored. I mean, the impetus and energy behind Donald Trump today is the fact that he was ignored by the New York elites. Nobody ever talks about this today, but. You need something that's going to drive you to push this idea to the marketplace.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  And your concept of seven, right, is, is that we make 8,300 phone calls a day, outbound phone calls a day from our offices on a minimum. That's the lowest number we'll hit all year. And we know that we have to contact a customer at least eight times. You hit my website and said, I'm interested in this thing that's happening this weekend. And you hit me at 2 o'clock in the morning or 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And we weren't available to take it right then and there. I have to call you eight times to get you on the phone once. I probably have to get you on the phone 12 times to close a deal. On men, on average, and it could be.

• 14:41David Weisburd?

  That goes back to that 10x rule. People call, they say, no, they're like, well, it didn't work. Well, you should have called 12 times.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, like we do this 332 rule. Okay, you call me today, you're interested. I'm calling you three times today, three times tomorrow, and two times on the third day. We know that formula. Now you're going to be like, oh, my God, bro, don't call me, what is that, eight times? Yeah, I'm going to call you eight times. I had a guy DM me yesterday on Twitter or on X. Man, your guys are relentless. He's like, they're terrible. He's like, they keep just trying to sell me. And I'm like, yeah, exactly, bro. And the reason we keep trying to sell you is you keep trying to resist us. And if you think I'm going to tell my guys to back off on you, you're wrong. If you're qualified and you really want my product and my product is really good, I'm going to keep hammering you until you do it. Okay, until the nail goes in. And a lot of people don't like this, okay? They don't like it because they don't do it.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  You don't like it because it's wrong. You don't like it because you don't do it. And you can't even imagine doing it. And you don't want it done to you. Okay, but understand the only person that resists us is the person that didn't buy from us. The other people have already bought. So we think, we think there's about 12% that will fall off the tree. The other 88% have to be pulled. I have to climb into the tree. I have to yank on the branch. I have to use tremendous amounts of effort to pull that apple out. Okay, otherwise, like, if I just wait till it falls out of the tree, it's on the ground, and I might not be there this weekend to pick it up, and then it spoils. So unless you're a monster company, unless you're lucky enough to be connected to the CIA. And be Meta or Amazon or Tesla and you got your funding from those guys.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, good for you. I don't have that. Okay. Mr. Beast, he can do quality because he's got funding from Silicon Valley. I do not have that. I have no funding, so I have to use more effort. And so that's what I would tell people. I'll get back, back to the 10x rule. You're underestimating the amount of resistance you're going to get in the marketplace.

• 16:33David Weisburd?

  It goes back to this axiom in sales, which is somebody's getting sold on the phone call. Either you're selling them to buy or they're selling you why they don't, they shouldn't buy.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  There's a sale made on every, every call, even when they don't pick up. Nah, I'm not going to take this phone call. That's a, that's a sale. The sale was made. Every, we believe that every customer is qualified. There's no such thing. If you remember the Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, these leads are bad. There's no such thing as a lead. There's just leads. And all leads buy something. Okay. All leads buy something and they're going to buy water. They're going to buy food. They might not buy your product, but all leads are buyers. So there's no such thing as something, a buyer not qualified, or they don't have the time, or they can't make a decision. That's, that's not true. I made a decision to take a breath of air. I took the time to take a breath of air.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  And like something's being sold at every moment. The, the person you're talking to is doing something when they hang up with you or don't answer the phone call with you.

• 17:29David Weisburd?

  I asked Ryan Serhant this very question, which is how long do you follow up? And he said, until you die or until they die?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. And it better be, it better be when they die because I'm coming back. So if you ask me, you know, I, I'm like, dude, I'm coming back. So you better hope, you better hope you die because I'm coming back and I'm gonna call you again. Like we've actually, we have, we have list, we have 7 million, 800,000 people on an email list. We'll make, we'll send out 420 million emails to that list this year. Okay. Do the math on that. And we make 8,000 outbound phone calls a day. This is one department in our education business. And so about 18% of our email list, David, unsubscribes every year because of too many emails. Now what's crazy is, okay, when we analyze the 18% that fell off.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  65% of those are our best customers and buy our most expensive products. So you would think without all that data that the people that are unsubscribing or not buying. The truth is the unsubscribed are our best VIP customers. They're just like, dude, I don't need the email anymore. Oh, by the way, as soon as they go to their Instagram, they're going to see me again. Remember, I was emailing him and he's trying to get away from me for a moment. But then he sees me on Instagram or then he sees me on YouTube or then he sees me on Tik Tok or sees me on business, Fox Business, or he sees me on David's podcast. But you're not getting away from me. Okay. And those same people end up on the front row of one of our events. So, so it's just like, where are you going to see me? And that's why I use this word omnipresence. You want to be in not one place, but all places.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  And anyone or anything or any product that can be viewed in multiple places, all at the same time, will be assigned some condition of power.

• 19:16David Weisburd?

  I think a lot of this is just a fear of rejection or ego preservation. People justify by saying, well, if I piss them off now, they might not buy in 10 years. But statistically, you have this chance, the buying window is open. They're either yes, or you're unlikely to close them. I think there's this lack of urgency that people don't really apply. They think they have these thousands of years to convert them.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Your mom told you, you know, be seen and not heard. Quit asking me the same thing over and over. You get broken, dude. The school system breaks kids. Sit in your chair and listen. It's a shame what happens in this that we do to people. That you're somehow going to be, you're going to go to college and you're going to get a job. That's actually not happening. Okay? We have the highest unemployment of much college educated today that we've ever had in the history of education. Kids are getting an education and still can't get a job. They don't even know how to show up for the job. They don't know how to insist on the job. So they don't know how to do a job interview. They don't know how to stand up from all the other job interviews. They don't know how to do a good, short, tight video and say, hey, why hire me? Like it's unbelievable what we're not teaching in this country. Which by the way, brings me to the biggest opportunity that we have now.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Like if you can be exceptional today, it is easier to stand out today than, than any other time in the history of the world.

• 20:24David Weisburd?

  Why is that?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Well, because first of all, the opportunities are so much bigger now. You look at the Paul brothers, okay? These guys, I mean, I mean, I have a big respect for both of them and what they built. Completely out of the box. Look at Mr. Beast.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Okay, when in history have we ever had 20 year olds making the kind of money these guys are making?

• 20:45Speaker 00

  And doing completely different things, by the way, I could just keep going down the list. You know about the 15 year old kid that's on YouTube making a million bucks a month like over and over. None of these stories were around 30 years ago or 15 years ago. None of this Logan Paul is gonna be a WWE wrestler and his brother's gonna make 92 million dollars in a dumb ass. Fight in a five round fight like it's unbelievable what people are doing. Mr. Beast has got a multi billion dollar business. Gets billions, billions of views, you know, in a week like none of this was happening. Okay, so I got a little company in here. I used to work in the automotive industry and, and one of my mentors, they sold their company. They had, I don't know about 60 or 70 car dealerships and they got a billion dollars for it. They, they spent two legacies building it.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  I have a company that has no inventory. That's probably worth the multiple companies probably worth 10 or 12 billion dollars today. If we put them all together and I have no inventory, no cars, only two locations, no debt.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  It's a different game today, man. If you got, if, if people can use AI today and social media and be curious. You know, and surround yourself with great people that believe in anything's possible. And filter out all the other negativity that's going on right now, all the noise, the amount of noise is crazy. And you haven't been priced out. Inflation's not the boogeyman. The US dollar is not going to go away. There's never been a better time, David, in my mind for people to get rich, for people to have freedom and for people to do it their way.

• 22:13David Weisburd?

  Said another way, traditional media is dead. People sitting around in a boardroom picking who's going to be the next star. That's dead. Media is now democratized. If you could be good, which is extremely difficult because you are competing with everybody. But if you could be good, you capture all the upside that before was captured by a few celebrities.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100% and I would just say that you have to be exceptional. You know, you can't, if you're going to be satisfied with good, you're going to be lumped in with everybody else. And exceptional takes, you know, it probably takes seven days a week and 80 hours a week. It's not gonna, it's not gonna be a 40 hour work week.

• 22:44David Weisburd?

  It goes back to this 10x rule and I just had a guest that wrote me this really nice note, which is like, you're a phenomenal podcaster. And I turned to my friend and I'm like, I'm a phenomenal recorder of podcasts. Because we're producing five episodes a week and we've been doing this now for, for half a year. And we realized that the only way, you say be exceptional. Who doesn't want to be exceptional? Everybody wants to be exceptional. Even mediocre people want to be exceptional. But the real advice actually goes back to this 10x rule, which is do more reps, do more and you will become exceptional.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  You get quality through quantity. Now, if you're one of those people that somehow figured out how to get a quality viral video one time, you keep your one viral video and I'll take my 15,000 attempts at video over your one viral video every day. Like if you ask me, hey Grant, you want one viral video that gets a billion views or you want 15 or 20,000 video? I want the 15 or 20,000 videos, okay? Do I want 10,000 customers or do I want one, one customer? One guy to give me a billion dollars or do I want, you know, 100,000 people to give me a billion? I want the 100,000 people to give me the billion dollars. I want quantity. Okay. Because here's the thing that comes with quantity. If you do quality, if you just do quality one time, even if, let's say it's not quality and you just got lucky one time. Do you don't have the reps. Okay?

• 23:57Speaker 00

  If I do something 15,000, now, now I have the success, I have the billion dollars and I got the 15,000 reps. Like the guy that only got, he got it out of his first score. He does not have that and he wonders if he was lucky. Okay. So, so you don't, you don't, you don't want the, you want the self-esteem builder. I mean, the greatest superpower a human being can have is tremendous self-esteem, belief in self. Regardless of how you look today or how your hair looks today or your shirt or whatever you like. I believe in me and I don't need to look at this. I don't need to look at my trophies. I don't need to look at yesterday. Have belief in myself. Okay. Those are the people that they're threats like Elon. Elon is a massive threat. Okay? The amount of self-esteem this individual has, Donald Trump, okay?

• 24:40Speaker 00

  His self-esteem borders on insanity. Okay? Because it's like, how does this guy believe he can do this? I don't get it.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  And, and, and now, now some of you are going to say narcissism and then you're going to say, oh, he's deluded and whatever dude, you could turn it to whatever level of mental illness you want to or wrongness or evil or whatever you want to do, but like, like if you take all that bullshit out and just look at the admiration point. You know, like, how does a guy believe in himself? Is he crazy? Maybe. Maybe, but dude, I, I want, I want some of that crazy. You know, and, and unfortunately, or fortunately, when you get to the top of the food chain of exceptionalism, however you guys define that Barack Obama was exceptional. Okay. He was an exceptional human being, like the way his, his orator skills, his delivery, his pulling people in Clinton.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Okay. Unbelievable orator. Okay. Like, like it's not just Trump, right? You could go over the history of Democrats, Republicans, white, brown, male, female, unbelievable orators and, and delivery people and Conor McGregor. Okay. He's got a lot of problems in his life right now, but unbelievable when he walked in that ring and controlled the USA. Like, I'm just looking for that greatness piece, not the neurosis part. And I'm like, how can I rob that guy? How can I rob that piece? How can I become that? And not dilute it with a whole bunch of, you know, negative, critical, oh, he's a narcissist. And say, hey, I, the only way to become exceptional in, in anything is through reps. That's it. Okay. There is no other way. And I don't want to win the lottery ticket. I'd love to win the lottery. I'd love to win the, every time there's a billion dollar lottery,

• 26:18Speaker 00

  I go buy one. Okay. But it's not how I expect to accumulate a billion dollars. And by the way, I'm crossing my fingers and I'm praying that I win that billion dollars. But I would rather earn a billion dollars over a career. I don't, I don't really mean this, by the way, to the lottery gods. Okay. I would rather earn a billion dollars, save a billion dollars, invest a billion dollars over, over time than, than win a billion dollars. And to the lottery gods, I don't really mean that. So if you got one, one, you know, send it to me, dude. I, I'd rather have both, by the way.

• 26:52David Weisburd?

  A lot of people realize that it takes a lot of reps to be successful, but a lot of people underestimate how those reps actually help your entire business. When you have those reps, everybody around you gets better. For us, our editors get better, the people that book our podcasts get better. Everything gets better if you do more. And yet, there's this perception that you can't do more and have high quality. And as you do more, your quality actually goes up. It's a paradox of sorts.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  1,000%. This idea that quality is senior to quantity is wrong. Quality, quantity is senior to the quality. Okay, you cannot get quality. It's so arrogant to think that anybody's gonna get one quality painting. Like Van Gogh, I don't know how many pieces Van Gogh did. I think he only sold one piece his whole life. He did hundreds and hundreds of pieces. Sometimes three and four and five and six pieces a day. It is so arrogant that people are like, I gotta get it right first. Dude, you're never gonna get it right. Okay, you don't even know what right is in the beginning. Like 10 years from now, you won't even be doing what you thought was right yesterday. So when I, when we first started doing social media, I was 52 years old.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  This is 2012. No one that was my age, I didn't feel 52, by the way. I felt like I was like 25 years old. And I saw the internet, I saw social media and I'm like, oh my God, dude, this is, this is, I'm gonna get known. I told my wife, I said, she was an actress. She came back from a, an audition one day and she was crying. She's like, oh, it was terrible, it was terrible. I'm like, baby, I'm gonna make you famous. I discovered YouTube today. Okay, you'll never have to go on another audition again. I'll have, I'm gonna get you millions of fans. And we're gonna get millions and millions of people to know our name and you'll never have to do another audition. And, cause I saw it immediately. I said, oh dude, this is, I can put as much as I want up. Okay, I didn't see the quality first.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  We, we would take a phone, turn it sideways, no lighting. We didn't have the little O-rings. We didn't have Zoom calls. We didn't have setups, dude, nothing. Like you look good, you got your little earpieces in, bro. You got your mic. We didn't have any of that shit, bro. I had an iPhone 4 or something. No lighting, grainy, took forever to upload it. Right, just one video at a time. I still have that first video up there. I think it had like 85 views over like 13 years.

• 29:09David Weisburd?

  We have a cultural norm in my company, which is you celebrate shitty first versions.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 29:16David Weisburd?

  Whenever somebody does something the first time, everyone celebrates the shitty and it's everybody expects it to be really bad and everybody understands how important it is.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we were doing no edits.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  We didn't have, you didn't have any apps to pull captions up. There was no translators, nothing, man, but it didn't matter to me. What mattered to me, I remember, I think there was like, I don't know, I did a live once. It was, I was 54 years old, two years into the social media. I think it was Periscope or Meerkat. I don't know, you probably don't even remember those platforms. They don't exist anymore. And there were 16 people listening to me live. I was in a little condo and I went to my wife when it was over. I'm like, oh my God, dude, the world's about to change. And she's like, what, what's going on? I said, there were 16 people watching me, 16. And I was so excited, bro, because I knew 16 would become 32. And 32 would become 300. Let me just say this, a bad presentation is better than no presentation.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Now, a lot of people will argue with me. I'd love to know in comments. Quantity or quality, okay? I'm just telling you guys, like, for anybody listening right now, quantity is senior to quality. And by the way, you really have to have a strong ego, sense of self and self-esteem to put up poor quality. And I could put up more quality.

• 30:32David Weisburd?

  Especially as you're older, as you're older, your ego becomes more fragile. Because now you can no longer say, I'm the 16 year old experimenting on YouTube. Now you're the 52 year old and it just becomes that much harder.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I was doing an interview with somebody the other day and they, somebody clipped it and said, Grant Cardone doesn't know what a deed is. I'm like, yeah, dude, I really don't. I have $5 billion worth of real estate. I don't really understand the difference between a deed and a title. Like, if you ask me right now, I think I know what they are, but like, I'm not 100% certain. So what? So, so I still have $5 billion worth of real estate. I don't know which one's more important, the deed, what's the difference between a deed, a title, and $5 billion, a bunch? So I don't have to know everything, you know, like, does that make me ignorant? Somebody's going to comment that you are. Hopefully, somebody's going to comment. But I would rather somebody comment negatively. I had a bank hit me yesterday.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  A week ago when Bitcoin was falling from, I think it fell from 96 down to 82 or something. I said Bitcoin is crashing. I have to sell my plane. A bank called me, emailed me yesterday and said, hey dude, are we all right over there? And I owed them some money. And they saw the post on X. And I'm like, I gotta call them this morning and say, bro. Part troll, part truth. Okay? Grant Cardone is part troll and part truth. And that's how I use the internet. I drag the internet with a little bit of troll and a little bit of truth. And the internet gets all excited.

• 31:58David Weisburd?

  You mentioned Jake Paul. I had him earlier on the podcast. We discussed this persona that he builds of being, you know, people hating him. Do you purposely do that? Or is it just a result of just being so bold and telling people to take action? People are just, some people are polarized by that. Is this a purposeful strategy?

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Most everything I do is not purposeful. I just kind of go with it, right? So, you know, things come to me like inspiration. I think God provides us with moments of inspiration. And there's a reason why they don't last. Inspiration does not last 30 minutes. Okay? Like it might last a minute. It might last 30 seconds. So when I'm inspired, I take that as something from God to just do, go with it. Like most of my marketing is inspired. The Bitcoin crash. Bitcoin's crashing. I need to sell my, I'm gonna sell my plane. I didn't say anything else. That's all I said. I showed a picture of my plane. Bitcoin's crashing. I'm gonna sell my plane. I didn't say I needed to sell my plane. I didn't say I was gonna sell my plane so I could buy Bitcoin. I let the audience decide what that meant.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  And, um, you know, the audience has imagination and they get engaged by it.

• 33:04David Weisburd?

  I'm curious, when you put up a post Bitcoin, I need to sell my plane. Do you know right away before you even post it, this is gold?

• 33:09Speaker 00

  No, no, no clue. No clue, dude. No clue. I'm not even attempting to do it like, I was just inspired to say something. This morning I'm driving to work and I was inspired to do an Instagram live and I did it. Hey guys, any questions you want answered? Again, this is just a humble, and I know people don't use the word humble with Grant Cardone. But I am actually fairly humble because I don't.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Trust I will be inspired later. So I take the moment, hey, I'm gonna do an Instagram live right now. Okay. It wasn't convenient, only had like 12 minutes before I got to work. And I just went with it. To me, it was humility. It was like, hey, God's inspiring you to do an Instagram live right now. Do it, dude. Don't, don't, you don't need to challenge it. You don't need to look good. You don't need to have a title. Just do it, bro. The thought came to me out of nowhere. I, I, it wasn't in my to do list today.

• 33:57David Weisburd?

  Speaking of humble, you also used the word broken before. You were at 25, a recovering drug addict. I grew up on Section 8 housing. I was an immigrant. We've both gotten successful. You've obviously gotten much more successful. But why do you think so many people are stuck in victim mode? Why can't they not shake this victim status?

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Man, I don't know. I don't know. You know. I don't know. I think, I think society, David.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Is doing a good job of convincing people that victim is, is like some, some title. You're a victim. You have mental illness. You have ADD. You have bipolar. You're poor. Blah, blah, blah. These, these are titles. None of these titles, by the way.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  You're a drug addict. You know, you come from an addictive, you got an addictive personality, blah, blah, blah. All these things are labels. These are not who you are. Okay, there's no such thing as any of these things, by the way.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Okay, I could take any drug addict right now, drop you off on an island and you will be over your addiction in 72 hours. You got a nicotine addiction? Oh, you can't kick it? Oh, yeah, I take the, I get tobacco out of your life. You will kick the, just put you in an environment where there's no nicotine, you'll be off of it. Okay, the bipolar, ADD, ADHD, these are all, these are labels. Introvert, extrovert, too active, not active enough. Bro, it's all bullshit. Middle class, upper class, like it, these are titles that are bullshit. They have zero validation. There's no validation that anyone has depression. None, zero. You. The person that's depressed.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Has given themselves the authority to label themselves depressed. Okay, but if I, if I, if I go over there and light your house on fire right now, I guarantee you depression will not be what you're thinking about. Fear will be what you're thinking about. And I'd rather be scared than depressed, by the way. So I'm just speaking from personal experience and, and if this offends anybody, the psychiatrists and the psychologists in this country that have figured out a label, uh, the big pharma companies that have figured out a label for every issue human beings have today from restless leg syndrome to depression to ADD to ADHD. Hey, good for you guys. Great marketing scheme. I don't need

• 36:11Speaker 00

  any medication for any of that. I need a purpose. I need to be surrounded by people that are taking action and I need to quit giving myself excuses.

• 36:21David Weisburd?

  So you've raised capital from retail for real estate than anyone else in history. What do you attribute to that? And what have been your lessons from raising from retail?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for saying that, dude, because I'm not on any list. Like when they say, hey, who's rate, who is the most?

• 36:35David Weisburd?

  I fact checked it. I looked it up with my team.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Well, dude, we, I mean, we have like, when you put social media, people that have made money using social media, we've raised over $2 billion and sold another $2 billion in products. This is a privately held company. This is not, you know, I'm not, and I, and I didn't take my clothes off to do it.

• 36:53David Weisburd?

  I had the CEO of iCapital, Lawrence Calcano. We talked about this $150 trillion that's going in from retail into the institutional market. And a lot of people are trying to crack retail. What have been your lessons? How did you crack retail when no one else has been able to do it at scale?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Number one is I believed in the retail investor before other people did. And I believed in democratizing, making my mom, when I grew up as a 15 year old, I watched my mom never be, nobody helped her make money. Nobody helped her with her investments. And I swore that one day I was going to grow up and help people if I was ever successful. And if I ever learned anything, I was going to figure out how to help the, the common person invest their money and make money. Um, I wasn't able to do it for my mom, but so in 2010, when the crowd run, crowdfunding rules changed, I think it was Barack Obama, the, the act of

• 37:41David Weisburd?

  Startup Jobs Act.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Jobs Act. Was that 12? 2012?

• 37:45David Weisburd?

  Somewhere around there.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  When I saw what he did there, then we started crowdfunding institutional quality real estate.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  It's a real asset. You can actually see the asset and I would fund it with my money and then I would go to my audience and say, hey, guys, I have this great opportunity. My family's completely invested in it and we set up a portal where you could go invest dollars and you could partner with me in this deal. We, we found, I found it, funded, put it on a site at the exact same price, whatever it costs us to acquire that asset, our expenses are included. And then I say to my audience, if you want to come in, come in. We've had 20,000 investors, raised almost $2 billion. Now, the way we did this, David, was we refused to go get the money from the banks. Now, now, this is why I think

• 38:31Speaker 00

  I've been successful is because the, the banks, because the social media influencer or the startup tends to look for the easier, softer path. And Blackstone or KKR or Wall Street is always the easier path because they write one big check. The problem with that one big check comes control. They now, for your laziness, for your laziness, for the, you know, you're, you're going to take, they're going to tell you how to run your company. They're going to tell you how long they give you the money. They're going to tell you how much the money costs. I didn't want to do that. So I went to my audience, much harder, by the way, much more difficult to do what I do. I'm not proud of that. I'm not, I'm not bragging. I'm saying it's harder.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  Because you have to do the repetitive message, but if you can pull it off the way we have. We were early doing it before it was respected. Now, everybody's trying to do it. Blackstone, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, they're all talking about how do I get to the retail investor? If you could pull it off, the money should be cheaper, it should be friendlier, and it should be longer. Meaning it's going to be, you're not going to have a, you're not going to have a gun to your head saying you have to, you have to pay the people back in three years because you want time. If you have a great business like we do in real estate, real estate wants time in order for it to reach its full maturity. So we have a 10-year fund with discretion to go another 10 years.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  We're in the process, we've done 47 deals, about $5.2 billion worth of real estate. We've sent out almost a half a billion dollars in cash flow. And we're going to take our portfolio probably and tokenize each one of our funds going forward. So there'll be a secondary market for it as well. And we're going to fund that direct to my audience.

• 40:17David Weisburd?

  You made a decision to add Bitcoin to the funds. Walk me through that.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  I've been buying real estate for almost 40 years now.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  And while real estate has been a very dependable investment over long periods of time, it's also very boring. It's very expensive. If you get a good piece of real estate, you want to hold on to it, but it's boring. Like it takes a long time for it to work. When it works, it works great. But every 10 years, it can be very expensive because of gutters, plumbing, HVAC, roofs, property taxes, etc. So last year, I mean, for 40 years, I've been looking for ways to improve my property. Well, there's only so many ways to improve the property. You could paint it, fix the kitchen,

• 41:01Speaker 00

  fix the plumbing, lighting, change the name, branding, treat the clients better, etc. But there's only so many things everybody can do. At some point, you're just real estate. And your real estate's across from my real estate and the rent's going to be about, you know, about the same. So last year, and for 40 years now, we've been looking for ways to improve that. Well, I've been studying Bitcoin for quite a while now. And last year, we combined real estate and Bitcoin. So we took a piece of real estate, paid cash for the real estate, very, very conservative, no debt. It was a $72 million complex. The product should have sold for 88 million. We paid 72 and we filled it up with $16 million of Bitcoin. So rather than just stealing the real estate, which I'm good at, that's what we do. We buy distressed properties below replacement costs.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  I've done 46 of those projects. What I tried to do was rather than just buying the distressed product, I just took the distressed portion, the gap, and rather than buying something invisible, a discount is a ghost. It's just cheaper. There's no real value in a discount. We took the discount portion and filled it up with a product called Bitcoin that has the volatility. It goes up and down, right? It can go, it could go all the way to zero or it could go to 250,000 of Bitcoin or 500 or right now it's just going sideways.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  So we combined the two, put the two together. We've done five of these now. We have, we accumulated almost 2,000 Bitcoin yesterday. I was with World Liberty Financial up at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. It was about 300 of us. There was mostly Bitcoiners and tokenized companies coming into this space. We're basically creating a new company. Okay. It's going to be a real estate Bitcoin hybrid vehicle. And the reason we did is because there's a, it's a way to improve returns to the real estate investor, to our investors. It's also a way to introduce our real estate investors, conservative investors that want cash flow to Bitcoin. And thirdly, and most importantly, it's the creation of a new financial vehicle that we believe is the first time in 65 years

• 43:02Speaker 00

  that real estate has been changed. So there's a little glitch in the real estate industry. It's about 65 years old called REIT, REITs. You'll hear to them referred as REITs, Real Estate Investment Trust. They cannot hold any currency on their, on their financial statement. They can never hold Bitcoin. They're trapped in a, you know, like a six to eight percent return a year. When we combine the two, real estate and Bitcoin, I now have a bit of a moat built around my company that 190 companies that control real estate in America at about $4 trillion cannot compete with me. So we think we create a new, I literally believe that I'm in a, I'm in a, we're going to

• 43:42Speaker 00

  look back 60 years from now and say that 2025 was the year that the real estate Bitcoin hybrid was created and it's going to change the way people invest in real estate going forward.

• 43:54David Weisburd?

  I have this term I coined, the virtue of illiquidity, and it came from my interviews with crypto investors. So if you think there's hundreds of millions, if not billions of crypto investors, there's a couple hundred, let's call it 500 or so that are fund managers. I've interviewed the top desk, the top 10%, and they all said in one variation or another, off the record, that the number one thing that determined their return is whether the capital was liquid or illiquid. So all the things that they were doing, all the research, all the, all the access, all of that paled in comparison with just not selling.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. See, Wall Street wants to talk all you guys into liquidity, but liquidity is not what you want. You want illiquidity. Now, when there's an opportunity, you want liquidity. But really, what I don't want, and the reason I love real estate and Bitcoin combined is because I take an illiquid asset, which is real estate. It's real, it's hard. It can't move. You can't steal it from me. You can't take it down. Like, you cannot steal my real estate. It's impossible. It's 330 units, it's $300 million. It takes up a whole block in Boca. It sits in front of a golf course. None of this is going to change. I see the ocean from every window. It's very physical. Then I combine it with something that's digital. I can't even find it in space or time. I can't even locate it.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  It sits on something called the blockchain. You combine those two, bro. It's like a, like, it's a physical and a tangible, a digital. One cash flows, one doesn't. One has a utility, one, I can't even put my hands around it, right? You combine the two together. I now have an illiquid asset. When you buy real estate, you don't sell it the next day. It would take six to nine months to sell this asset. I combine it with a very liquid asset. It goes up and down like this, and I don't have to worry about it going up and down anymore. I just need time. You know, imagine owning the Vatican, or where, you know, right, the 16th chapel in the 1400s, or whenever it was built, right, and what it's worth today. You want real estate for long periods of time, and if you believe Bitcoin's here to stay,

• 45:48Speaker 00

  you want Bitcoin 12 years from now. You don't, you don't really care about the next 12 days. You care about the next 12 years.

• 45:53David Weisburd?

  I love Bitcoin. I'm a Bitcoin bull, but isn't it dangerous to hold it in a real estate portfolio? And why is that not like adding a lot of risk and a lot of leverage?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Well, I would just tell you, if you're just a Bitcoiner, right, you wouldn't do my deal. You would just do the Bitcoin, and you'd buy it at $68,000 or $66,000 today. You'd sit and wait for your one Bitcoin. But, look, 99% of the world does not even know what Bitcoin is, okay? If you said BTC, they'd be like, "I don't know what you're talking about, dude. Is that BTC or STD?" Like, I'm not sure what you're talking about. 99% of planet Earth does not know what Bitcoin is. They do not know Michael Saylor. They do not know what the White Paper is. They do not know the Book of Bitcoin Standard, period. In the story, they don't know what the word fungible means. Okay, like, they don't know. 99% of planet Earth understands real estate. We created a vehicle that is very understandable. Piece of real estate, the cash flows, physical location, 101 Meisner Boca Raton.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  I bought it out of bankruptcy, $230 million. It should have sold for 350. There was 14 other institutional investors. I closed the project in 10 days. Paid cash, 230 million, 10 day close, bought it from Blackstone out of their debt fund. Okay, it was a distressed asset. We stole it. You can Google it, 101 Meisner. Now, here comes the Bitcoin story. We added Bitcoin on top of it. Okay, the real estate investor now owns the real estate. The cash flow gets the depreciation. And we added $100 million of Bitcoin. We added 1,000 coins to that purchase, 1,075 coins. You have the real estate that I can condo out of and pick up 200 million. Sell off the condos.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  The investors will make 200 million and we still own 1,075 Bitcoin. I have the best of two worlds. You end up with one Bitcoin. Okay, I end up with the real estate, the condo exit, the real estate exit, the cash flow, the depreciation and the Bitcoin. If the Bitcoin skyrockets and I own 1,075 at purchase.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  And it goes to a million dollars tomorrow, I could sell off my Bitcoin and make a billion dollars. $1 billion is what we would make. If that takes one year, two years, five years or 12 years, I think it goes to a million dollars one day. I make a billion dollars on the real estate 12 years from now. I could profit my investors on the Bitcoin or borrow against the Bitcoin and I still own my real estate. So I don't have to make a decision on one or the other. No, we won't do either one of those. We'll combine this. We're going to keep adding Bitcoin real estate hybrids. And we'll go to the public markets and see if the public markets give us a, the institutions, your buddies. If they're going to give me a premium for combining 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 of these together. And we think they will.

• 48:26David Weisburd?

  I think a lot of people underestimate behaviorally how to invest. So they think I'm going to buy one Bitcoin, I'm going to ride it up and down. And the data always shows most people have loose hands, they will sell. So you have to think about how do you create an anti-fragile portfolio? How do you construct your portfolio in such a way that you don't sell?

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and look, I think Bitcoin is going to outlast companies. Like I just, you know, my real estate, that piece of 101 Meisner in Boca or anything you guys see at Cardone Capital. My entire portfolio will be around longer than Meta. It'll be around longer than Google, could be around longer than Amazon, okay? All companies get replaced at some point with technology. So I believe Bitcoin will be around longer than the US dollar. Will the US dollar go away this decade? 20 years from now, 30 years from now? No, I don't think so. I think it'd be 50 years. But I believe the blockchain will be there 100 years from now. I believe, I don't believe we go back to gold. I believe gold failed as a currency. Otherwise, we'd all be having, we'd have gold, I'd have gold coins in my pocket today, but dude, it failed.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Okay, we went gold, we went paper, we went paper to treasury bills, treasury bills, you know, to, to, oh, oh shit, I got, I got money on my Apple account on my phone. Okay, I, I, somewhere in between there, I got a Visa, Mastercard, American Express, those are gonna go away. Plastic will not be plastic. It will all be, it will all be on the blockchain. Bitcoin will be one of the winners. I don't know what the other winners are, but there'll be more than one winner. But in the future, we will not trade. And look, I'm 60, 67 years old. I don't understand this whole, this world that we're moving into, but I'm, I understand this, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna resist it. I was at Mar-a-Lago yesterday and David Solomon said, he's curious about Bitcoin.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  He observes Bitcoin, but he owns very, very, very little Bitcoin. And he's telling you, dude, he's telling you, and, and by what, but why, why would Goldman Sachs, a $4 trillion legacy tradfi bank, have to embrace Bitcoin? It doesn't, and it won't, by the way. It's gonna be new players.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  So, so it's gonna be, Blackstone's gonna, I, I think Goldman Sachs has $20 billion or $2 billion. It's .0005% of their entire AUM. It's nothing. So when they say 20 billion, everybody's like, oh my God, that's big, that's nothing. It is .0005. Ibit represents a tiny, tiny fraction of BlackRock's $11 trillion, even though it's one of their biggest ETFs. So it's still early and it's gonna be, it's gonna be the new guys. In real estate, we say new outsiders make the market. I believe Bitcoin will be made by outsiders like myself coming up with new ideas about how to introduce the public to Bitcoin.

• 51:06David Weisburd?

  You've built this amazing online presence, organization, sales system. What in your business has compounded the most and what has grown more linearly?

• 51:15Speaker 00

  God, man, we have so many difficulties here. I wish you wouldn't even bring that. You've ruined a good interview. You know, I was happy and everything and now like I gotta start dealing with the problems. I mean, there's so many things that we're having trouble scaling, right? We just, my real estate's very difficult to scale. Okay? I, I, I love, I love great assets. I love great locations and there's not a lot of great locations. Like, you know, we, we own 47 properties. For me to duplicate the 47 and have great locations, there's probably not even 47 great locations in America.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  New York City, Chicago, California, I can't even touch those markets right now. Because, because of some of the decisions they're making on property taxes. How they handcuff the property owner from raising rents. Like, if you can't raise rents, you shouldn't buy the real estate.

• 51:58David Weisburd?

  Could you double click on that because the New York City mayor is framing this as a tax on the rich? Why does that affect more than just the rich?

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  Look, you, you should, if you understood, I'm not saying you. But if the American people fully understood economics, you would understand that Madami in New York is weaponizing the wealth divide.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Okay, he's basically weaponizing as a political weapon, the concept of the wealth divide. And it is in his best interest to expand the wealth divide and further bring attention to why

• 52:41Speaker 00

  my side's wrong and his side is right. Okay? And how do you do that? Raise property taxes. Who pays property taxes? People that have money, people that have property. The conservative party, you're conservative because you have something to conserve. I was a Democrat the first half of my life. When I started owning property, I became a Republican. I became somebody more interested in conserving my assets. I'm like, no, I want lower taxes, dude. I own assets. I want lower taxes. I want lower property taxes. Okay? I want to own the asset. I would suggest to you the billionaires, we should have a no tax on billionaires in this country. We should reward the billionaire.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  We should reward people that get to high levels of production and create big AUMs and our net worth. We should reward that audience and say, dude, once you become worth a billion dollars, you will pay no more taxes on anything. Okay, on none of your income or the sale of your assets. Okay. Now, why would that benefit American people? Because billionaires, look, there's only 3,000 of us on the planet. And I'm not proposing this for me. I don't care one way or the other. I already know how to not pay taxes. I buy real estate, dude. Real estate is the greatest loophole for taxes in the world. So, but, but these billionaires, the Jeff Bezos, when Jeff moves into Miami, Jeff moved here, Mark moved here, both Google boys moved here, Ken Griffin moved here. These are

• 54:03Speaker 00

  all billion, multi billionaires. They, they make my network look like a, a quarter. Okay. Who else moved down here? Ken Griffin moved down with 58 billion. Both Google boys, Palantir moved down this week. Guys, these are billion dollar, these are entire country footprints popping into one marketplace. And what happens when they do that is they hire 20 people just for their house. Then they buy a yacht. Okay. Guess what? All that is money back into the economy. The city of New York, Madami, wants to raise the budget in New York City for eight million people to a budget that is greater than the entire state of Florida that has three times more people.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  He's running billionaires and deck of millionaires out of, out of the city of New York that are coming down to, by the way, to Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Naples, Florida, Orlando, Tampa, California is doing the same thing over. But you, all you gotta do is look at the U-Haul, the U-Haul, uh, patterns. They're just rushing over here. And guess what? I'm still gonna go back to New York City and visit. I'm gonna rent a hotel now. I'm gonna use your city. I'm gonna use your cities, your streets, your restaurants. I'm not gonna pay you any taxes. I'm gonna come use you like a prostitute. California, I go back to California, I can spend 179 days a year there. I still have a house here. I'll go use the beaches, use the streets, use the hospitals, but I'll pay you

• 55:27Speaker 00

  no taxes. Now I'm buying all my cars here. I'm buying my house here. I have my 400 employees here, all of them being paid here. So that's what I would tell people, man, like you, you, you need to understand that the socialists, Chicago's doing it, Minneapolis is doing it, Minnesota's doing it, Boston's done it. They are weaponizing the wealth divide to say that I'm better than you, you should tax grant. No, no, you should become me. Okay, everybody should get rich. Nobody should pay taxes. Donald Trump is going to try to outlaw property taxes across the country. He's going to weaponize it, by the way. He's going to use it as a political weapon too, and he's going to divide the states and say, why should you guys pay taxes in Chicago? Chicago's out of control, bro. Like you can't, we were going to buy

• 56:12Speaker 00

  a real estate asset there and we could not determine what next year's taxes would be on the property. How can you buy something when you can't predict what the cost of it's going to be next year?

• 56:25David Weisburd?

  Talk about Madmani, I have the number one lobbyist on a podcast, Bradley Tusk, he was early at Uber, helped them devise their strategy. And what he believes and the way that he lobbied politicians is he believes that over 99% of them are highly irrational actors. So think about it as coin operated. So Madmani is using this as a rhetorical device. To be fair, all politicians are doing that, both Republican and Democrat, they have different, different marketing channels. But if you go upstream and look at what is driving the politicians' behaviors, oftentimes it's highly rational action, it just might be conflicted with, with a portion of the population.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, both sides do it. Okay, it's, if I was, if I was in politics, I would do it. I would, I would do the same thing. I would weaponize. It's a chess match, dude. Like it's backgammon. It's a, it's a, I want to win. And how do you win? You, you, now, now, I can't make sense of theirs because it's socialism. And I can't make sense of mine because I believe in the free market, right? Free market with some control to win. I want to win. But I know that if you, if you rewarded people to become worth billions of dollars, more people would do it, dude. We would have courses in school.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  You should reward people that do well and you should, I mean, you don't even have to penalize people that don't do well. The penalties are already in place. The penalties are you're not going to have a nice house. You're not going to have a nice view. Okay. The penalties are for not doing well. If you're not educated is nobody's going to hire you. The penalties are in place. There should be rewards for doing extremely well. And again, I'm not fighting for me because I, I, I've already figured out how not to pay taxes. I've only paid taxes three times out of the last 25 years. Because I, I use capital, I use, you know, accelerated depreciation on our assets to wipe out my earned income. I told Trump this four weeks ago. I said, you should accelerate depreciation on single family homes. You will become the hero in this country.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Every person that goes out and buys a house for 400 grand would then get a $200,000 bonus depreciation, day one. Institutions already do this. I do it on every asset I buy. Okay, I can write off. Everything that depreciates in three years, five years or seven years gets written off in year one. So basically half the property would get written off. 200,000 would get, would be a paper loss to buy a house for 400. I'd put 5% down, 20 grand down, but I'd get a $200,000 loss against my income. Let's say I'm earning 50,000 a year. I would have four years of not paying taxes to get back to that 200. The American people would go crazy. Okay. It's a, it's a bit of a, you, you, you would tell the, the Democrat party won't support it because it's Trump. And then Trump's going to be like, look,

• 59:04Speaker 00

  they won't do it. Okay. The property tax thing, he should, he should provide federal incentives for every state that zeros out property taxes. Illinois won't support it. California won't support it. Washington, because of the divide. He would be weaponizing. He'd basically be scheming. I mean, it, it is, it's a gimmick, right? You want to win.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  But it would still be great for the American people. I mean, what, what American wants to pay more taxes? What homeowner, by the way, what homeowner should ever have to pay property taxes? No homeowner should have to pay property taxes. That's my damn asset. And your, your audience could be like, well, if, if nobody pays property taxes, who takes care of the roads? There's another million ways to take care of the roads. Okay, your house property tax, should you pay a bike tax? Should you pay a motorcycle tax every year? Should you pay a shirt tax? Should I have to pay taxes because I own clothery? No, you made sense of paying taxes on your home because nobody challenged it. There should be no property taxes. There should be no earned income taxes, by the way. Shouldn't be any. But you see, the American people have been talked into this bullshit because of loyalty and patriotic and da, da, da.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  And the truth is 100, 250 years ago, we fought over 1%. We killed people over a 1% tax. Now we roll over every time they increase the taxes like it's a Diddy party that we're being re-invited to.

• 1:00:26David Weisburd?

  Grant, you've lived a full life full of high highs, low lows. If you could go back to 25-year-old Grant, right? When you were starting to come out of your addiction, what would be one timeless piece of advice you'd give that younger Grant? That would have either helped accelerate your career or helped you avoid costing the sticks?

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  God, man, there'd be so many things I would tell him. One is, hey, don't use drugs, dude. You know, drugs, drugs are bad. Nobody beats them. Weed's not good for you, okay? Weed's gonna be, you know, all of it, dude. All the weed, the weed, this, all of it, dude. Leave it all alone, dude. There's no upside to it. Number two, I would say, hey, you know, you gotta work. You gotta, you gotta work at shit you don't like to do. You gotta, I would tell Grant, you have to do shit you don't like to do, okay? I would tell Grant, hey, dude, while they do five days, you do seven days. You do seven days a week, don't do five days a week, violate God's plan, you know, the, the Bible, violate it, work on Sundays, even though God said don't. Handle him later.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Okay, you do great things, work seven days, violate the law till you get rich and then, you know, make up for this the seventh day later when you get to heaven. God's gonna be like, you worked the seventh day, I told you not to do that. I'm like, yeah, but I did a lot of good shit, dude. I had to admit it, I helped a lot of people, which would be the fourth thing I would tell them, help people, man. When you're not helping yourself, help other people. Help as many people. When you get good at something, share it with somebody else. When you get better, by the way, you'll get better because you shared it. When you get better, share that with somebody else. And when you get great, because you will, when you get great, share that with somebody else and then just keep repeating that over and over. The last thing I would say is between the age of 25 and probably 38, you know, unless you happen to stumble into the perfect person, I would not

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  get married. I would wait. I would, I waited until I was 51 years old to, to, to start having a family. And look, I don't know that I'm, I'm not completely tied to this last piece because I wish I'd had more kids, but um, I don't know that a somebody that if you haven't figured out your career and your money yet, I don't know how you're going to figure out a family.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  And I don't want my wife working. You know, I want to take care of my wife. She wants to go do something good, but I don't need her, I don't want her, I don't need her working in the marketplace. I want to take care of the family. So anyway, I could go on and on. There'd be another 10 pieces of advice I'd give people, but.

• 1:02:54David Weisburd?

  What's something that you've changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  We were gonna go public last year. Okay, and now I'm thinking, I don't want to go public. I want to, I want to tokenize my assets. I want to put them on the blockchain. I want to bypass the banks. I want to do what I've been doing. I don't want to, I don't want to go kiss the ring. Okay, I want to figure out how to bypass Blackstone and tokenize my assets.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  And continue to democratize directly to the audience, keep building out my retail audience, reward them, and then go to the banks and feed the banks later. Because I think the banks will find me more valuable. So that's one thing. Last year, we were, we were set on going public. We had met with eight banks, all eight were interested. And now I'm trying, now I'm a, I'm reconsidering that. I'm just being completely transparent. I did not know you were going to ask me this, but we're looking at tokenizing our assets,

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  turning our 20,000 person investor audience into 200,000 and getting bigger and then going to the banks and figuring out how to do something bigger with them at a later date.

• 1:04:08David Weisburd?

  Another 10x.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, another 10x.

• 1:04:13David Weisburd?

  Well, Grant, this has been absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on. Look forward to continue this conversation live.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, David, let's do this again, man. Fantastic. You do a fantastic job. Genuinely mean this. I do a lot of interviews, but what you're doing with your podcast is, it's very impressive.

• 1:04:27David Weisburd?

  Thank you, Grant. That's it for today's episode of How I Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable, or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.