# Why ‘Quality Over Quantity’ Is Keeping You BROKE

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Grant Cardone says success takes far more effort than most people expect, and repeated action builds quality and self-belief.

- Show: How I Invest
- Hosts: [David Weisburd](https://realalpha.app/people/david-weisburd/)
- Guest: [Grant Cardone](https://realalpha.app/people/grant-cardone/) is CEO of Cardone Capital.
- Published: Mar 2, 2026
- Length: 1 h 3 m

## The best minutes

- [37:27](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2247) [Retail capital can give real estate funds more control](https://realalpha.app/s/retail-capital-can-give-real-estate-funds-more-control/) (4 min)
- [41:27](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2487) [Cardone combines discounted real estate with Bitcoin](https://realalpha.app/s/cardone-combines-discounted-real-estate-with-bitcoin/) (4 min)
- [45:01](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2701) [Illiquidity can help investors hold through volatility](https://realalpha.app/s/illiquidity-can-help-investors-hold-through-volatility/) (5 min)

## Also worth watching

- [52:13](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3133) [Scarce locations and local rules limit real estate growth](https://realalpha.app/s/scarce-locations-and-local-rules-limit-real-estate-growth/) (3 min)

Skip the roughly 37-minute opening on success, rejection, sales and marketing, then the later tax-policy debate and closing personal advice.

## Full analysis: Grant Cardone says he’d choose 15,000 video reps over one viral hit

- Cardone cites 15,000 video attempts and says he would choose them over one viral hit.
- His operating examples show repeatable outreach, but not that volume alone produces quality or returns.
- Measure learning and conversion, and underwrite the real estate pitch separately.

Its 7 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/#analysis), free with an account:

- [23:24](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1404) Repeated attempts build skill before polish arrives
- [28:00](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1680) Repetition can improve the whole production system
- [13:48](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=828) Follow-up makes activity measurable, but costly
- [40:51](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2451) Retail capital trades fundraising work for time
- [42:43](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2563) The Bitcoin hybrid adds a second investment thesis
- [46:41](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2801) Illiquidity may steady behavior but limits choice
- [52:44](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3164) Scarce locations and local rules constrain expansion

## Summary

The description identifies Grant Cardone as CEO of Cardone Capital, a private real estate investment firm managing over $5 billion in assets. It says he has written eight business books and created thirteen best-selling business programs.

Grant Cardone argues that people underestimate the work success takes and that repeated attempts—not polish at the outset—produce quality, confidence and market reach. He describes persistent follow-up and omnipresent marketing as ways to overcome being ignored, and says digital media gives operators a chance to build audiences without traditional gatekeepers. Cardone says Cardone Capital has raised nearly $2 billion from about 20,000 investors and is pairing multifamily real estate with Bitcoin in a new investment vehicle. He also criticizes property-tax uncertainty and says he is reconsidering a public listing in favor of tokenizing assets.

### Minute by minute

- [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=0) **Effort is often underestimated.** Cardone opens by arguing that quantity produces quality, then says people underestimate both the work and obstacles involved in success. He calls the 10X Rule an arbitrary multiplier and argues that schools do not teach investing, compounding or rejection.
- [20:01](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1201) **Digital media widens the opportunity.** Cardone argues that online media lets exceptional performers reach audiences without traditional media gatekeepers, citing the Paul brothers and MrBeast. He says standing out still takes about seven days and 80 hours a week, but creators can capture upside that once went to a few celebrities.
- [35:01](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2101) **Cardone rejects diagnostic labels.** Cardone says he views labels such as addiction, depression and introversion as separate from a person’s identity. He says he needs purpose and action rather than medication, and claims that removing access to a drug can end an addiction.
- [37:27](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2247) **Retail investors fund real estate.** Cardone says he wanted ordinary investors to access real estate after seeing his mother receive little help with investing. He says the firm has raised nearly $2 billion from 20,000 investors across 47 deals worth about $5.2 billion. He prefers retail fundraising to bank capital because he believes it offers more time and less control from outside investors.
- [41:27](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2487) **Real estate meets Bitcoin.** Cardone describes a $72 million apartment complex purchased in cash, which he says should have sold for $88 million, alongside $16 million of Bitcoin. He says the approach pairs real estate cash flow with Bitcoin’s volatility and could create a new investment vehicle; he says the firm has completed five such deals.
- [45:10](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2710) **Illiquidity rewards long holding.** Cardone argues that investors benefit from holding illiquid assets rather than selling in response to volatility. He says real estate’s physical cash flow and Bitcoin’s digital nature complement each other, and predicts that blockchain-based money will outlast some existing payment systems.
- [52:13](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3133) **Tax uncertainty limits acquisitions.** Cardone says real estate is difficult to scale because prime locations are scarce and he avoids places where property-tax policy or rent restrictions make future costs hard to predict. He criticizes proposed tax increases in New York City and says such policies could push property owners and investment elsewhere.
- [58:03](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3483) **Cardone argues for lower taxes.** Cardone says politicians on both sides use the wealth divide to win support, but argues that tax policy should reward high production and reduce property taxes. He proposes accelerated depreciation for home buyers, giving the example of a $400,000 house producing a $200,000 first-year paper loss.
- [1:01:32](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3692) **Cardone rethinks his listing plan.** Looking back, Cardone says he would avoid drugs, work seven days a week and share what he learns; he also says he might wait to marry until his career and finances are established, while acknowledging uncertainty about that advice. He says he is reconsidering a public listing after meeting with eight banks and now wants to tokenize assets and grow his retail investor base.

## Transcript

How I Invest, hosted by David Weisburd, with Grant Cardone.

From the transcript How I Invest publishes with the episode. Where the podcast’s audio and the video part ways, some times are a minute or so off.

[0:06](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=6) succeed. Why do you think people so systematically underestimate how how hard it is to succeed? If you underestimate the 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 Madame, 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 out.

[0:37](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=37) 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 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 from me. 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 re people simply underestimate.

[1:10](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=70) So the 10 x rule was basically, like, whatever you think and this is an arbitrary, by the way, completely made up. It's not science. A 10 x 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 a 100. If you think it's gonna be a 100, you know, 10 x it, it's gonna be a thousand. It's gonna be harder, and it's gonna be better than you ever imagined, by the way. That's the upside of the 10 x rule. Okay? Whatever you think it you know, your dream, if when you hit your dream 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.

[1:51](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=111) 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? You have a seven time better chance of becoming a millionaire in America than you do of having apps. I 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 twelve years. By the way, that that was dumb. We had to look 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.

[2:26](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=146) 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 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. 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.

[3:00](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=180) 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 extroberting 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. I'm gonna sit up there.

[3:35](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=215) I'm probably not gonna talk to anybody for eleven 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, 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 forty hour work week, air condition, heaters, a car, a garage, days off, president's day, Christmas, a bonus at Christmas.

[4:22](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=262) 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 twelve? They should. I homeschooled both my kids. My first kid was out of high school just at her fifteenth birthday. To play devil's advocate, these skills like extroversion, dealing with the rejection, could they really be taught in the classroom? 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.

[4:57](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=297) 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.

[5:31](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=331) And I'm like, pick up the phone, make the call. You gotta make 85 phone calls a day. 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 pick up the phone, easy the first time, but on the twelfth call and nobody's answered, it that 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 I don't like that game because of the rejection. The rejection is not the issue.

[6:06](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=366) Being ignored as a human being is a spiritual entity. As a person trying to add value in the marketplace, being ignored is is is probably the most painful thing. And anybody who's ever done a startup and had a great idea, you know what I mean. I've interviewed eight billionaires. You're now the ninth billionaire. And one of 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? I would agree with that with everybody. Every human being has you know, you have assets and liabilities, and you should know them.

[6:37](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=397) And just like you should know your assets And do you think the schooling system misrepresents what it takes to be successful in that getting an A minus across the board isn't really helpful? One of the hardest things of investing is seeing what's shifting before everyone else does. For decades, only the largest hedge funds could afford extensive channel research programs to spot inflection points before earnings and to stay ahead of consensus. Meanwhile, smaller funds have been forced to cobble together ad hoc channel intelligence or rely on stale reports from sell side shops. But channel checks are no longer a luxury.

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[7:49](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=469) The best part, these proprietary channel checks integrate directly into AlphaSense's research platform trusted by 75% of the world's top hedge funds with access to over 500,000,000 premium sources from company filings and brokerage research to news trade journals and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts. That context turns raw signal into conviction. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Check it out for yourself at alpha-sense.com/howiinvest. Yeah. A 100%, dude. 1100%. 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 Not your kids, but I'm just saying the average kid can't because their average parent can't.

[8:34](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=514) 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. Also, there's a point in my trajectory, I mean, 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 a 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.

[9:16](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=556) 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 wanna go. Right? So that's cool because it's transparent. Because I'm not thinking about I'm not I'm not I'm not thinking about what your audience needs to hear. You're just gonna get the very authentic version of me, but it's a liability because I didn't let you finish, You know, you might not feel good about it. Maybe you didn't finish your whole question, and my wife's gonna hate it because this is what I do to her all the time.

[9:55](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=595) Speaking of language, you use words like dominate when you talk about capturing market share. Tell me about your language. You have some great questions, man. I gotta tell you. I've 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. There's newspapers, billboards maybe, and TV and radio. And I didn't have any money.

[10:33](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=633) If you don't have any money and the only way to get your message out is to buy an ad or direct mail, you had to fund it, right? So now here fast forward, Here we are today in Instagram and TikTok and and 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 at dominating their space. They're number one. They 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.

[11:21](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=681) 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, no. I didn't even know who Ricky Bobby was even though I'm from the South. If you're not first, you're last. What's really about you have to be first on the mind of the consumer. The consumer does not buy the best product ever. 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. So whatever bank is most omnipresent in your marketplace is the most trusted bank.

[11:54](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=714) If it's Wells Fargo and you see them on every street corner, it's the most trusted. If it's the the the Starbucks, Starbucks does not spend any money in advertising, but they'll have locations that are very concentrated. So you're gonna 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 gonna 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.

[12:30](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=750) You walk another block, you're gonna see us again even though you rejected the store, the second store, boom, third store, you're buying a coffee that you didn't even need. 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. Well, I did I became a what if I'm a dominant force, I I became that because I was terrified to be ignored. I was terrified of being ignored, dude. I had these good ideas. My whole career, I come I up with these good ideas every, like, eight or ten years.

[13:03](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=783) And then you gotta push a new idea into the marketplace, and nobody wants to hear it. Like and nobody's gonna 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 you need something that's gonna drive you to push this idea to the marketplace. 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.

[13:44](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=824) 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 you hit my website and said, I'm interested in this thing that's happening this weekend, and you hit me at 02:00 in the morning or 02:00 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 That goes back to that 10 extra rule. People call. They say no. They're like, well, didn't work. Well, you should have called 12 times.

[14:19](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=859) Yeah. Like like, we we do this three three two 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 gonna be like, oh my god, bro. Don't call me, what is that? Eight times? Yeah. I'm gonna 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 gonna tell my guys to back off on you, you're wrong.

[14:55](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=895) If you're qualified and you really want my product and my product is really good, I'm gonna keep hammering you until you do it. Okay? Until the nail goes in and and a lot of people don't like this. Okay? They don't like it because they don't do it. 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 there's about 12% that will fall off the tree, the other 88% have to be pulled.

[15:26](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=926) 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, you 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. Okay? Well, good for you. I don't have that. Okay? Mister Beast, he can do quality because he's got funding from Silicon Valley. I do not have that.

[16:04](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=964) I have no funding, so I have to use more effort. And so that's what I would tell people. Get back back in the 10 x rule. You're underestimating the amount of resistance you're gonna get in the marketplace. 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. There's a sale made on every every call. Even when they don't pick up, nah. I'm not gonna take this phone call. That's a that's a sale. The 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.

[16:38](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=998) 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 gonna buy water. They're gonna 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. 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.

[17:14](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1034) 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? 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 a call you again. Like, we've actually we have we have list. We have 7,800,000 people on the email list. We'll make we'll send out 420,000,000 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.

[17:53](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1073) 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, 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, don't need the email anymore. Oh, by the way, as soon as they go to their Instagram, they're gonna see me again. Remember, was emailing him and he's trying to get away from me for a moment.

[18:35](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1115) But then he sees me on Instagram or then he sees me on YouTube or then he sees me on TikTok or sees me on 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 gonna see me? And that's why I use this word omnipresence. You wanna be in not one place but all places. 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. I think a lot of this is just a fear of rejection or ego preservation.

[19:14](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1154) People justify it by saying, well, if I piss them off now, they might not buy in ten years. But statistically, you have this chance. The buying window's open. They're either yes or you're unlikely to close them. Think there's this lack of urgency that people don't really apply. They think they have these thousands of years to to convert them. 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 gonna be you're gonna go to college and you're gonna get a job.

[19:46](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1186) 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 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 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.

[20:16](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1216) Like, if you can be exceptional today, it is easier to stand out today than than any other time in the history of the Why is that? 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, have a big respect for both of them and what they built. Completely out of the box. Look at mister Beast. K? When in history have we ever had 20 year olds making the kind of money these guys are making? 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?

[20:51](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1251) Like, over and over. None of these stories were around thirty years ago or fifteen years ago. None of this. Logan Paul is gonna be a WWE wrestler, and his brother's gonna make $92,000,000 in a dumbass fight, a five round fight. Like, it's unbelievable what people are doing. Mister Beast has got a multibillion dollar business, gets billions billions of views, you know, in a week, like none of this was happening. Okay? So I 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.

[21:27](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1287) They they spent two legacies building it. I have a company that has no inventory that's probably worth the multiple company is probably worth 10 or $12,000,000,000 today if we put them all together. And I have no inventory, no cars, only two locations, no debt. It's a different game today, man. If you got if people can use AI today in 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.

[22:10](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1330) The US dollar's not gonna 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. Said another way, traditional media is dead. People sitting around in a boardroom picking who's gonna be the next star, that's dead. Media is now democratized. If you could be good, which is extremely difficult because you're competing with everybody, but if you could be good, you capture all the upside that before was captured by a few celebrities. Yeah. A 100%. And I'm just saying that you have to be exceptional. You know you know, you can't if you're gonna be satisfied with good, you're gonna be lumped in with everybody else.

[22:45](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1365) And exceptional takes you know, it probably takes seven days a week and eighty hours a week. It's not gonna it's not gonna be a forty hour work week. 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. 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 wanna be exceptional? Everybody wants to be exceptional. Even mediocre people wanna be exceptional.

[23:18](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1398) But the real advice actually goes back to this 10x role, which is do more reps, do more, and you will become exceptional. 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, a 100,000 people to give me a billion?

[24:00](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1440) 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 you let's say it's not quality and you just got lucky one time. Dude, you don't have the reps. Okay? If I do something 15 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.

[24:40](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1480) 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. I have belief in myself. Okay? The the 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? 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. And and and now now some of you are gonna say narcissism, and then you're gonna say, oh, he's, deluded and whatever, dude.

[25:23](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1523) You could turn it to whatever level of mental illness you want to or wrongness or evil or whatever you wanna 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? Yep. Maybe. Maybe. But, dude, I 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.

[26:04](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1564) Clinton. Okay? Unbelievable orator. Okay? Like like, it's not just Trump. Right? There 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 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?

[26:40](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1600) And say, hey. I the only way to become exceptional in anything is through reps. That's it. Okay? There is no other way. And, I don't wanna 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, 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, 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.

[27:24](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1644) 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. 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 podcast 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.

[27:59](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1679) 111000%. This 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 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, ten years from now, you won't even be doing what you thought was right yesterday.

[28:44](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1724) So when I when we first started doing social media, I was 52 years old. 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, 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 an audition one day, and she was crying. She's like, oh, it was terrible. It was terrible. I'm like, baby, I'm a 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.

[29:30](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1770) Because I saw it immediately, said, dude, this is I can put as much as I want up. I didn't see the quality first. 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 four or something. No lighting, grainy, took forever to upload it. Bro, just one video at a time. I still have that first video up there. I think it had, like, 85 views over, like, thirteen years. We have a cultural norm in my company, which is you celebrate shitty first versions.

[30:14](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1814) I love that. 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 Yeah. And we we were doing no edits. We didn't have you didn't have any apps to to pull captions up. There was no translators. Nothing, man. But I it didn't matter to me. What mattered to me, I remember, I think there was, like 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.

[30:51](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1851) They don't exist anymore. And there were 16 people listening to me live. I was in a little condo, I and 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's 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. 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.

[31:30](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1890) 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 poor quality. 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. 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 $5,000,000,000 worth of real estate. I don't really understand the difference between a deed and a title.

[32:02](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1922) Like if you ask me right now, I think I know what they are but like I'm not a 100% certain. So what? So I still have $5,000,000,000 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 $5,000,000,000? A bunch. So I I I don't have to know everything. You know? Like, does that make me ignorant? Somebody's gonna comment that you are. Hopefully, somebody's gonna comment. But I would rather somebody comment negatively. I had a bank hit me yesterday, a week ago when Bitcoin was falling from, I think it fell from 96 down to to 82 or something.

[32:38](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1958) I said, Bitcoin is crashing. I have to sell my plane. A bank called me, emailed me yesterday and said, hey, dude. Are we alright over there? And I owed them some money. And they saw the the 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. 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.

[33:13](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=1993) 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? Most everything I do is not purposeful. I I just kinda go with it. Right? So, you know, things come to me. Like 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 thirty minutes. Okay? Like, it might last a minute. It might last thirty seconds. So when I'm inspired, I take that as something from God to just do. Go go with it.

[33:47](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2027) Like, most of my marketing is inspired. The Bitcoin crashed. 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. And, you know, the audience has imagination, and they get engaged by it. 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? No.

[34:18](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2058) No. No clue. No clue, dude. No clue. I I'm not even attempting to do it like, you know, 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 wanna answer? Again, this is just a humble and I know that people don't use the word humble with Grant Cardone, but I am actually fairly humble because I don't trust I will be inspired later. So I take the moment. Hey. I I'm gonna do an Instagram live right now. Okay? It wasn't convenient. Only had, like, twelve minutes before I got to work, and I just went with it.

[34:50](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2090) 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. You the thought came to me out of nowhere. I I it wasn't in my to do list today. Speaking of humble, you also used the word broken before. You were at 25, a recovering drag add drug addict. I grew up on section eight housing. I was an immigrant. We've both obviously gotten much more successful. But why do you think so many people are stuck in victim mode? Why can they not shake this victim status?

[35:23](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2123) Man, I don't know. I don't know. You know? I don't know. I think I think society, David, 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 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. K? There's no such thing as any of these things, by the way. Okay? I could take any drug addict right now, drop you off on an island and you will be over your addiction in seventy two hours.

[36:04](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2164) You got a nicotine addiction, oh, you can't kick it? Oh, yeah. I take the I I get to back out of your life. You will kick the I just put you in an environment where there's no nicotine, you'll be off of it. Okay, the bipolar, ADD, ADHD, these labels, introvert, extrovert, too active, not active enough. Bro, it's all bullshit. Middle class, upper class, 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, has given themselves the authority to label themselves depressed. K? 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.

[36:50](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2210) Fear will be what you're thinking about. And I'd rather be scared than depressed, by the way. So I'm just speaking for personal experience, and and if this offends anybody, psychiatrists and the psychologists in this country that have figured out a label, 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 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.

[37:40](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2260) 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? Well, thank you for saying that, dude, because I'm not on any list. Like, when they say, hey. Who's rate? Who who is the most I fact checked it. I looked it up with my team. Well, dude, we well, I mean, we have, like when you put social media people that have made money using social media, we've raised over $2,000,000,000 and sold another $2,000,000,000 in products. This is a privately held company. This is not you know, I'm not and I and I I didn't take my clothes off to do it.

[38:12](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2292) I had the CEO of iCapital, Lawrence Calcano. We talked about this $150,000,000,000,000 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? Number one is I believed in the retail investor before other people did. And I believed in democratizing, making my 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 gonna grow up and help people if I was ever successful.

[38:44](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2324) And if I ever learned anything, I was gonna figure out how to help the the the common person invest their money and make money. 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 that the the act of Startup Jobs Act. Jobs Act. Was that '12? 2012? Somewhere around there. When I saw what he did there, then we started crowdfunding institutional quality real estate. 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, have this great opportunity.

[39:20](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2360) 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. I find it, fund it, 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 wanna come in, come in. We've had 20,000 investors, raised almost $2,000,000,000. 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 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.

[40:04](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2404) 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 you're you're gonna take you they're they're gonna tell you how to run your company. They're gonna tell you how long they give you the money. They're gonna tell you how much the money cost. I didn't wanna 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, because you have to do the repetitive message.

[40:36](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2436) 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.

[40:51](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2451) **Grant Cardone:** If you could pull it off, the money should be cheaper, it should be friendlier, and it should be longer.

[40:56](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2456) Meaning, it's gonna be, you're not gonna have a you're not gonna 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 ten year fund with discretion to go another ten years. We're in the process. We've done 47 deals, about 5,200,000,000 worth of, real estate. We've sent out almost a half $1,000,000,000 in cash flow, and we're gonna take our portfolio probably and tokenize each one of our funds going forward so there'd be a secondary market for it as well.

[41:33](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2493) And we're gonna fund that direct to my audience. You made a decision to add Bitcoin to the funds. Walk me through that. I've I've been buying real estate for almost forty years now. 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 wanna 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 ten years, it can be very expensive because of gutters, plumbing, HVAC, roofs, property taxes, etcetera. So last year I mean, for forty years, I've been looking for for ways to improve my property.

[42:15](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2535) Well, there's only so many ways to improve the property. You can paint it, fix the kitchen, fix the plumbing, lighting, change the name, branding, treat the clients better, etcetera. 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 gonna be about, you know, about the same. So last year and for forty 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.

[42:48](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2568) It was a $72,000,000 complex. The the product should have sold for 88,000,000. We paid 72, and we filled it up with $16,000,000 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 cost. I've done 46 of those projects. What I tried to do was rather than just buying the distressed product, I just took the the 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.

[43:23](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2603) **Grant Cardone:** We took the discount portion and filled it up with a product called Bitcoin that has the volatility.

[43:29](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2609) 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. So we combine 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. There was about 300 of us. There was mostly Bitcoiners and tokenized companies coming into this space. We're we're basically creating a new company. Okay? It's gonna be a real estate Bitcoin hybrid vehicle. And the reason we did it is because there's a it's a way to improve returns to the real estate investor, to our investors.

[44:08](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2648) 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 sixty five years that real estate has been changed. So there's a little glitch in the real estate industry that's about sixty five years old called r e I t, REITs. You'll hear to them referred as REITs, real estate investment trust. They cannot hold any currency on their financial statement. They can never hold Bitcoin. They're trapped in a, you know, like a six to 8% return a year.

[44:44](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2684) When we combine the two, real estate and Bitcoin, I now have a bit of a moat built around my company that a 190 companies that control real estate in America at about $4,000,000,000,000 cannot compete with me. So we think we create a new I literally believe that I'm gonna I'm gonna we're gonna look back sixty years from now and say that 2025 was the year that the real estate Bitcoin hybrid was created, and it's gonna change the way people invest in real estate going forward. 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 100, let's call it 500 or so that are fund managers.

[45:26](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2726) I've interviewed the top decile, 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. Yeah. See see 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, you'd 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.

[45:58](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2758) It's real. It's hard. It 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 $300,000,000. It takes up a whole block in Boca. It sits in front of a golf course. None of this is gonna change. I 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. It sits on something called the blockchain. You combine those two, bro. It's like a like, it's a physical and a tangent a a digital. One cash flows, one doesn't, one has a utility, one, I can't even put my hands around it.

[46:37](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2797) Right? You combine the two together, I now have an illiquid asset.

[46:41](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2801) **Grant Cardone:** When you buy real estate, you don't sell it the next day. It would take six to nine months to sell this asset.

[46:46](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2806) I combine it with a very liquid asset that goes up and down like this and I don't have to worry about it going up and down anymore. I just need time. Imagine owning the Vatican or where where you know, right, the 16th Chapel in in in the fourteen hundreds or whenever it was built, right, and what it's worth today. You want real estate for long periods of time. And and if you believe Bitcoin's here to stay, you want Bitcoin twelve years from now. You don't you don't really care about the next twelve days. You care about the next twelve years. I love Bitcoin. I'm a Bitcoin bull. But isn't it dangerous to hold it in a real estate portfolio?

[47:17](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2837) And why is that not, like, adding a lot of risk and a lot of leverage? Well, I would just tell you, if you're just a Bitcoiner, right, you you wouldn't do my deal. You 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 1 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.

[47:46](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2866) They do not know the book, the Bitcoin Standard. Period. End of story. They don't know what the word fungible means. Okay? Like, they don't know. 99% of Plan Air understands real estate. We created a vehicle that is very understandable. Piece of real estate, the cash flows, physical location, 101 Meisner, Boca Raton. I bought it out of bankruptcy, $230,000,000. It should've sold for $3.50. There was 14 other institutional investors. I closed the project in ten days. Paid cash, 230,000,000, ten day close, bought it from Blackstone out of their debt fund. K? It was a distressed asset. We stole it.

[48:22](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2902) You can Google it. 101 Meisner. Now here comes the Bitcoin story. We added Bitcoin on top of it. K? The real estate investor now owns the real estate, the cash flow, gets the depreciation, and we added a $100,000,000 of Bitcoin. We added a thousand coins to that purchase, a thousand and 75 coins. You have the real estate that I can condo out of and pick up 200,000,000, sell off the condos, the investors will make 200,000,000, and we still own a thousand and 75 Bitcoin. I have the best of two worlds. You end up with one Bitcoin. Okay? I end up with real estate, the condo exit, the real estate exit, the cash flow, the depreciation, and the Bitcoin.

[49:01](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2941) If the Bitcoin skyrockets and I own a thousand 75 at purchase and it goes to a million dollars tomorrow, I could sell off my Bitcoin and make a billion dollars. $1,000,000,000 is what we would make. If that takes one year, two years, five years, or twelve years, I think it goes to a million dollars one day. I I make a billion dollars on the real estate. Twelve 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. Now we won't do either one of those. We'll combine this. We're gonna 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 gonna give me a premium for combining 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 of these together.

[49:44](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=2984) And we think they will. I think a lot of people underestimate behaviorally how to invest. So they think I'm gonna buy one Bitcoin. I'm gonna 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? Yeah. And and look, I think Bitcoin's gonna outlast companies. Like, I just you know, my real estate, that piece of 101 Meisner and Boca or anything you guys see at Cardone Capital, my entire portfolio will be around longer than Meta.

[50:16](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3016) 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, twenty years from now, thirty years from now? No. I don't think so. I I think it'd be fifty years, but I believe the blockchain will be there a hundred 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 have gold. I'd have gold coins in my pocket today, but, dude, it failed. Okay?

[50:44](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3044) 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, got a Visa, 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 sixty sixty seven years old. I don't understand this whole this world that we're moving into, but I'm I understand this.

[51:19](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3079) 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. 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 by why why would Goldman Sachs, a 4,000,000,000,000 legacy trad fi bank, have to embrace Bitcoin? It doesn't, and it won't, by the way. It's gonna be new players. So so it's gonna be Blackstone's gonna I think I think Goldman Sachs has $20,000,000,000 or $2,000,000,000. It's point zero zero zero five percent of their entire AUM. It's nothing. So when they say 20,000,000,000, everybody's like, oh my god.

[52:00](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3120) That's big. That's nothing. It is point zero zero zero five. IBIT represents a tiny, tiny fraction of BlackRock's $11,000,000,000,000 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. You've built this amazing online presence, organization, sales system. What in your business has compounded the most, and what has grown more linearly? God, man. We have so many difficulties here.

[52:36](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3156) 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. Mean, I 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. 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.

[53:14](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3194) **Grant Cardone:** Like, if you can't raise rents, you shouldn't buy the real estate.

[53:17](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3197) Can 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? Yeah. Look. You you should if you understood I'm not saying you. But if the American people fully understood economics, you would understand that Madame in New York is weaponizing the wealth divide. K? He's basically weaponizing as a political weapon the concept of the wealth divide. And what he it is in his best interest to expand the wealth divide and further bring attention to why my side's wrong and his side is right. Okay? And how do you do that?

[54:04](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3244) 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 wanna 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.

[54:38](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3278) We should reward people to get to high levels of production and create big AUMs and or, net worths. 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. I'm And not I'm not proposing this for me. I don't care one way or the other. I already know how to not pay taxes. How about real estate, dude? Real estate is the greatest loophole for taxes in the world.

[55:11](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3311) So but but the the 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 all billion multibillionaires. They they make my network look like a a quarter. Okay? Who else moved down here? Ken Griffin moved down with 58,000,000,000. 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?

[55:46](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3346) All that is money back into the economy. The City Of New York, Madame, wants to raise the budget in New York City for 8,000,000 people to a budget that is greater than the entire state of Florida that has three times more people. 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, bro. You all you gotta do is look at the U Haul, the U Haul patterns. They're just rushing over here. And guess what? I'm still gonna go back to New York City and visit.

[56:26](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3386) 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'll back to California. I can spend a hundred and seventy nine days a year there. I still have a house there. I'll go use the beaches, use the streets, use the hospitals, but I'll pay you 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, Like, you you you need to understand that the socialists Chicago's doing it.

[56:59](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3419) 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 gonna try to outlaw property taxes across the country. He's gonna weaponize it, by the way. He's gonna use it as a political weapon too, and he's gonna divide the states and say, why should you guys pay taxes in Chicago? Chicago is out of control, bro. Like, you can't we were gonna buy a real estate asset there, and we could not determine what next year's taxes would be on the property.

[57:37](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3457) How can you buy something when you can't predict what the cost of it's gonna be next year? Talk about Madamani. I have the number one lobbyist on the 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 rational actors. So think about it as coin operated. So Mahdmani 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.

[58:16](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3496) It just might be conflicted with with a portion of population. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look. Both sides do it. Okay? It's I'm 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 I wanna win. And how do you win? You now I can't make sense of theirs because it's socialism. And I can make sense of mine because I I believe in the free market. Right? I've free market with some control to win. I wanna win. But I know that if you if you rewarded people to become worth billions of dollars, more people would do it, dude.

[58:51](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3531) We we would have courses in school. 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 gonna have a nice house. You're not gonna have a nice view. Okay? The penalties are for not doing well. If you're not educated, nobody's gonna 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 twenty five years because I I used capital.

[59:25](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3565) I used, 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'll become the hero in this country. Every person that goes out and buys a house for $400 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.

[1:00:02](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3602) I'd put 5% down, $20 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 will go crazy. Okay? It's a it's a bit of you you you would tell the the Democrat party won't support it because it's Trump. And then Trump's gonna be like, look. 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.

[1:00:38](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3638) He basically be scheming. I mean, it it is what it's a gimmick. Right? You wanna win. 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 gonna be like, well, if we if we don't if nobody pays property taxes, who takes care of the roads? There's another million ways to take care of the roads. K? Your house property tax, should you pay a bike tax? Should you pay a motorcycle tax every year?

[1:01:10](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3670) 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. And the truth is a 100 and 250 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 ditty party that we're being reinvited to. Grant, you've lived a full life full of high highs, low lows.

[1:01:49](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3709) 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 cost and mistakes? 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. Weeds not good for you, okay? Weeds gonna be all of it, dude. All the weed, the weed, all of it, dude. Leave it all alone, There's no upside to it. Number two, I would say, hey, gotta work. You gotta work at shit you don't like to do.

[1:02:24](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3744) 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 Bible violate it, work on Sundays even though God said don't. Handle him later. 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. Gotta admit it.

[1:02:57](https://realalpha.app/v/Uh6AC9QX-ws/?t=3777) 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.