The NO BS Guide To Making $10 MILLION In 10 Years (Do This Now) | Grant Cardone & Lewis Howes

Grant Cardone tells Lewis Howes how he built a $4 billion real estate portfolio and plans to hit $40 billion in five years. Wealth is a people business, not a product one. Break your target into daily numbers: to make $10 million in 10 years, you need $1.58 per minute.
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Welcome back everyone to School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Grant Cardone in the house.
My man.
Good to see you, brother. Always good. Always good. Always good. I think I've known you for 14 years, I believe now. I think we met in 2009. We did a Zoom interview back in the day when you were kind of just getting started, which is essentially when.
You were about 50 years young. You know, your late 40s. Yeah. No, no, probably Really?
Somewhere around there.
Yeah.
Your late 40s, maybe. How long have we known each other? 14 years. Yeah. So that I was 51 years old.
I don't think I had kids yet. I don't even know if you had kids.
You didn't have one thing.
You had just got on social media. Yeah, that's right. You were just like, okay, I'm gonna.
Go all in on this at 50, which is inspiring. It's amazing what you built. I was almost broke back then. Right. I mean, I had a house. I had a house and I had cars and I wasn't broke, right? But I was scared. I think that was coming out of O.
Right after the recession.
Right after the, yeah. So, so O.
A.
Recession, you were doing webinars. I was doing webinars and LinkedIn stuff.
Yeah.
You were teaching online and you went from like sales to real estate.
Yeah.
And every time you've been on here, my goal is to challenge you to get to the next level of your wealth. You don't need me to do that. You're gonna do that on your own, but it's always fun to have these conversations. and before we get into that, well.
That'S the only reason I'm here, by the way, because, okay, I was telling you beforehand, I said, you know, that there was one interview you did with me where you challenged me.
Yeah.
And if anybody's been watching the previous one, they probably remember it. But I was doing a $100 million deal, and you said, well, not why not a billion. And look, when I was doing this deal, it was like I was picking up something I couldn't pick up. Right. It was like so big for me.
You were moving mountains.
To me, I was moving mountains. I'm like, this is going to be pro, you know, how am I going to do this? I don't have the money. I don't know the people. I don't have the like, I didn't have the financing. I'm like, I'm never going to make this happen. And then you said, would you why not do the 10x thing, dude, and do a billion?
I was like, and it when I.
Left here, it wasn't just you saying it to me in the moment. It haunted me when I left here. I kept asking myself that question. Yeah, why aren't you not thinking about the million? You know, why aren't, and then we went out and did, I don't know what the next deal was, but it was, I achieved that that year.
Right.
From 100 million to a billion.
Yeah. So that's why I'm back here today because now I want to do it again. So I'm hoping you got some good vibe or karma. That was a successful action. So I'm sure.
And I think that was like, I don't know, four or five years ago and now you're at, about four billion in assets. And it just keeps growing and growing. And you said the goal is 40 billion now. So it's like, we're just gonna keep 10x-ing it.
Yeah.
What do you think was in the way mentally and emotionally from you thinking and doing a $100 million deal and taking it to a billion in the next year?
It's just, you know, it's just you hadn't done it. You know, so I think we all, you know, I love this dream big, but, you know, the reality is most of us don't dream big. and inflation with the price of things going up. And I've said this for 10 years, you know, everybody asked me, you know, hey, when's enough enough? I'm like, enough is never enough because until enough is enough, if nothing changes. And then one day when you find out enough wasn't enough, it's too late. And so you just found that out with this last period of inflation and bananas, the price of chicken, whatever, whatever, whatever they're promoting to us now to make people feel scarcity. and experience scarcity. If people want to create wealth for themselves, it's not just money, it's people. It's not how much money I have. I mean, we all know about the wealthy person that has no friends. He's on a yacht by himself. And that's not wealth, right? It's just a bunch of money and material collections. So like, there's no, to me, there's no way to create real wealth by just going inside. You got to go out, I got to add people. Right. so like I say almost yes to almost everything. Somebody asked me to do something or a podcast or an interview. I'm like, yeah, let's go do let's figure out how to do it. Why do you say yes to everything? Because because it connects me to another person. You know, it adds it adds an experience. Whether it was good or bad, it adds an experience in my life that involved people, not money and physical things, you know, and I don't think people know that about me, but like like I like the interaction with people, even though sometimes I don't want to do it. Right. Look, I don't like going to events. I like running an event, you know, because, but I don't like going to them. But I know going to them, like you said earlier, is me being humble enough to say, I'm going to be a participant. I'm going to go learn something from these people, but it's uncomfortable. You don't know anybody. You're having to meet people. So just for me, wealth is like, how can I meet more people? But if you're, if you're, if you're thinking, like that. And that's the money problem. Yeah. How am I gonna build. How am I. How are you gonna get a million dollars if you're broke? It's through people. It's not through an idea or I'm gonna go build something or make something. It's through a person. All. All wealth comes through people, right? It doesn't come here, you know? So Elon's got to sell its car to somebody. Right.
People.
Totally. Yeah. So Coca-Cola's got to get somebody to pick up that can. And, hey, I has to have somebody to prompt it, unless it's gonna start prompting on its own.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With, you know, there's a lot of fear and insecurity right now around the banks collapsing. It seems like more banks are gonna be collapsing around inflation, the US dollar not going as far as it used to go. And everyone's been talking about a recession that's here, that's coming.
Yeah, yeah.
Housing, commercial real estate, the banks, all these things. What's your thoughts and feelings around what is happening and what you think will happen over the next 12 to 18 months?
Right.
So I'm going to say something that.
I think most people would disagree with me on, but first of all, inflation is a boogeyman that's not even real.
Really?
Look, I'm just telling you inflation, even Warren Buffett says maybe two people on the entire planet even understand the concept of inflation.
What is so complicated?
What is inflation? So inflation, Yeah, it's a great question, right? And what is a recession, by the way? So inflation is an increased price or price on some commodity that is desired, right? So you actually want inflation. You don't not want inflation.
Why?
Because you want the value of your products to go up, not down. If you're thinking as a consumer, okay, which you're not dreaming big if you're thinking as a consumer, oh my God, bananas went up. Okay, don't eat them. Ages went up. Ages did not go up because of this boogeyman. And it didn't go up because the dollar went down in value. And it didn't go up because we print money. None of this is true. Now I know your audience in the comments, they're going to freaking try to destroy me.
So if we print a bunch of money...
If you print a trillion dollars and put it in this building right now, nothing inflated. you just print a bunch of money. It is the distribution of that money. Okay? I distribute the money to a billion people. Then they have money. Okay? That, even the distribution of the money, sharing a trillion dollars would not create inflation. It is when the money is moved into the marketplace.
That's when inflation happens.
If the consumer, the dreamer, The person elects to use the money. Okay, so inflation was created because we gave everybody a $1,400 check and people went and bought what they didn't need and couldn't afford. By the way, inflation is created by me buying eggs that are too expensive that I can't afford. So if the eggs are too expensive, don't buy them. The marketplace will take care of it.
Then it'll go back down.
Exactly. Okay. So your, your supplies will go up and people will be like, I got all these eggs. I want to get rid of them. So let's just count. I'll do two for one. I'll three for one or four for one. So, and I know, like we've all been told, and I'm a bit of a contrarian, I'm not a conspiracy person, but I am a contrarian. I see that when masses of people go into an agreement about a topic, typically, historically, they're all interesting. Okay? The cost of goods are going up. We're going to raise interest rates to reduce jobs. This is what Powell said. There's too many people employed. Everybody should be employed.
Isn't that a good thing?
Sure. What's the problem?
Why do they want to reduce jobs?
Yeah, exactly. So like, why do you want to put pain on people that need work? Oh, because the cost of goods went up too high. And so they started selling this. Your coffee cup went up, your chicken went up, your aluminum went up, your housing materials went up, okay? Everything went up, right? Well, part of that was because supplies were stuck in Long Beach. and you couldn't get them out. And then rich people were like, okay, I can't get a chip for the car. How about I pay you 150 for the $78,000 car? Okay, yeah, we do have a chip. And people started spending money that had been distributed on products they couldn't get and paying a premium to get the product. And then for some reason, the whole world went nuts and started buying they didn't need. Gucci's went up. cars went up, homes went up, homes always go up, by the way, real estate goes up every time there's a crisis because people are worried about their money. So they want to buy something with it. If I'm going to, if I'm going to go down, I want to have a nice home. Did you buy a home? I did buy a home. See, people, people, after 9/11, people responded like that. They went out and bought homes. I did it in the last couple of months.
I didn't do it like in the middle of the crisis.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so what they're saying right now is it was because we interest rates were too low for too long. And so now what they're going to do is raise interest rates. Okay. The only people they're punishing right now are people in the middle class. And so I don't know what the agenda is, but I know it's not about inflation because, because raising interest rates, the only people that's hurt is people that want to buy a home or people that need to buy a car or people that a farmer that needs to buy a tractor. or it hurts a bank, a small regional bank. There's 4,000 small regional banks. And there's maybe five or six major mega.
Because they're not able to get loans, because people can't get loans anymore, right?
Well, what happens is, let's say the Los Angeles little Century City Bank, whatever it is, they are holding your money at 0% right now. okay? But you found out, oh my God, I can go get a treasury meal for 5%. So I'm gonna take my deposit out and I'm gonna put it over here in this treasury bill. Well, that deposit comes out of that bank. When that deposit leaves that bank, they cannot lend money anymore. And banks make money lending money. Okay? Banks are very risky. Banks are extremely risky business. They're not a safe business.
So when they start doing, you know, four and a half, 5% like these other places are doing with the interest for people with their money. Because they're taking it out and putting other places to get 5% right now.
Because if they pay you four and a half percent, where are they going to put money to get five? Okay, they got to go buy a three or five year or 10 year obligation. And you might want your money back tomorrow. So if you want your money back tomorrow, they have this obligation out there. okay? Banks in America are insolvent. We're already, like, it's not a banking crisis because the federal government will come in and solve the problem. Really? Because I was literally at this milking thing, right? And the verbiage there is, look, there's five banks that are too big to fail, so they don't need to be protected.
What are those five?
JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo. I mean, JP Morgan's got probably $8 trillion under management.
Wow.
Wells Fargo, the smaller of the groups, got 2.2 trillion. They're too big to fail. You don't need to do FDIC insurance. It doesn't matter. They shouldn't have any insurance at those banks. They're so massive that if they fail, the entire planet, the entire global system, economic system, would implode on itself. So that's called too big to fail, right? Now there's all these 4,000 regional banks. that are just combined won't equal these top five. So they need FDIC insurance, supposedly. So at this Milken Institute, they're talking about, well, what should the limits be? Now, these are the biggest economic, you know, powers in the world. Yeah. This is guys that ran the Fed, ran the FDIC. Another guy ran the entire budget. Secretary Mnuchin was there. Steve Manduch, and he was at the Beverly Hills Hotel eating breakfast this morning. I was over there. And so these guys are saying what needs to happen. Well, they're saying all money should be insured to any limit, which is crazy, man. Which means, you know, like right now you're protected up to 250,000. Okay? It started out back in the 30s, it was like $5,000.
Really?
Yeah. But, you know, inflation. they had to change it. But the reason they tell you your money's insured is because they don't want you to run to the bank and grab it out.
Because they want you to know it's safe. If something happens, you still got your money. Yeah.
Now the audience is watching this right now saying, man, I got lost in this whole thing. And that's the game right there, okay? Because basically, all this stuff is pretend, okay? We everyday people, think about money different than they do.
How do we think about it versus.
How those- well, we think about it being limited, problematic, I need to insure it, where is it, who has it, they're like, hey dude, all this is made up. Insure it all. Just protect these five banks. But you can't, because this country needs those 4,000 banks. If you're gonna go get a loan for a tractor, you're not going to JP Morgan. they're not gonna give it to you.
They're not gonna talk to you.
No, it's too small time. They're gonna give you some JP Morgan little joint over here. Yeah, you wanna put a deposit in, it'll be three or four, five weeks before we get it approved. Right. Then you're not gonna walk in there and get money, you're not gonna walk in there and get a loan. So that's a problem in our country. And for anybody that's, you know, feeling like I'm overlooked, people of color that can't get loans, this is gonna get worse, not better. Really? People that don't have money that wanna get in the game, it's gonna get worse, not better. like you don't want to lose small banks, but it looks to me like they want to get this down to a handful of banks.
Wow.
And then you got to be connected. So, so this is when about 12 years ago, I started studying these guys, J. Jp Morgan Goldman Sachs, the sovereign funds. These guys have trillions of dollars, the, the Orange County Pension Fund that has $20 billion under management. Wow. So what are they doing every day?
You know, what are they doing?
They think in terms of tremendous amounts of money, not little amounts, okay? They don't save their money. None of it is saved. It's all invested. But what do they tell us to do? Save your money, man. Save your money, get invested, diversify your investments. They don't do that. So if you look at what they do, they take major positions. JP Morgan just bought First Republic. They're guaranteed $5 billion profit. They're protected against the first 90 billion in losses. These are inside deals, man. This is an inside game. And so I can't get on the inside, you can't get on the inside, your audience can't get on the inside, but what you can do is you can take a peek at what they're doing, you know, see what moves they're making. And that's why we created Cardone Capital, so we could put enough money together. This will become a bank at some point. you know, the goal is to be able to be, I'm going to be at the table with these guys, okay? So they'll feed me rather than feed me.
Say that again. They'll feed you rather than feed you.
We'll eat together.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Rather than eating me. Right, right. Which is what the fee is.
Right, right.
You know, and unfortunately, that's how big people need to dream now. Like if you want to get above it, and this is what I've been saying to the middle class for a long time, dude, the middle class, is a made up term. It was created and manufactured. It doesn't exist in Europe. Okay? Other parts of the world, it doesn't exist. They're manufacturing one in Africa right now. Okay? The middle class is a set class of people that should be satisfied with enough. It's basically, it was basically a label like most labels. that is put on people to explain why you are there. Okay, explains why you have this condition. Oh, your ADD. Okay, well, where's the test? Don't have one. It's inflation. Okay, show me the inflation test. Oh, well, this went up to that. Okay, well, we also printed $14 trillion. So based on the amount of money that was printed around the world, we actually don't have any inflation. Really, because if you took the amount of money that was printed and took the amount of price escalation, you would have a lot further to go to distribute all that money.
How should people be framing their mindset.
With all this information? You don't want to go out of anything in the middle, man. You don't want to be baloney. On the baloney sandwich, the baloney is what gets eaten. You want to get outside the sandwich. You don't want to be crammed in. You want to figure out what does the top of this pyramid structure do. you know, how do you get at the top for your family? The best health you can get in, the best intelligence, the best connections, how do you have friends and family that all have enough money and mobility and time to go do the things you want to go do with them? That's what these people do. These people want to spend 100 grand on a ticket and spend three or four days, you know, hobnobbing with one another and staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel where the hotel rooms are 2200 bucks a night and eating $40 french fries. If they want to do that with themselves, they got themselves in a position to operate up there with those people. And so that's the big thing. It's not send my kids to college and pay off my mortgage.
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What should you do or what should you not do?
Both.
Well, you don't borrow money to go to college. That's just ridiculous, unless you're gonna, I don't, I mean, I don't even know why you'd do it to be a doctor. You know, most doctors aren't making money today. So why would you trade five or six or seven years of income time is money. So I wouldn't go to college. I would never buy a home. I would never put debt on a home. If I bought a home, I wouldn't put debt on it. What else would I not do? And these are nevers for me on the come up. On the come up. Yeah. On the come up.
Once you have the cash. Once you're in your, your, your, your.
Your, if you're wealthy and you want to go buy homes and, you know, buy yachts and stuff, go do whatever you want to do. but on the come up, you would never spend your income, you would never spend primary income on improving the quality of your life. You would only invest, I just did a video on Aaron Judge, what he should be doing with this 360 million dollar deal.
Yeah.
So that in the fifth year he wouldn't have to pay any more federal taxes.
Wow.
And actually, I saw A-Rod the other day come up to him. He's like, Aaron called me as soon as you posted that video. wants to know if you're the real deal. So people should not, they should be investing the entire, let's say you can live on four grand. Anything you make above four grand, you should invest 100% of that money. And you should invest in things to get your tax write-offs.
What are the main things to get tax write-offs?
Well, there's not very many left. Real estates, like, there is the Mac Daddy. Now, I mean, a plane gets you, but but you got a service to play and pay for that. It just doesn't make sense.
But.
People probably shouldn't start their own business.
Why not?
Because it's just not good. Historically, the person that works for a company makes more money than 60% of the companies in America.
Really?
Yeah. Almost $20,000 a year. So people shouldn't save money, people should not diversify their investments, people should not be invested in ETFs. mutual funds. They're making Vanguard a trillion dollar Powerhouse. They're not making you any money.
But isn't, like, Buffett and some of these, you know, big Financial guys saying to diversify your money?
Yeah, but they don't. But they don't do that.
No, no.
He just bought. He just bought his. His first score was Geico. He put all his money in Geico. Elon. Elon made. Had all his money in PayPal. okay, sold it PayPal. He didn't invest half of it. He invested 100 of it, didn't have any money left over to buy a house. He invested all his money in three companies that he, that he owned today. I think he's got six Investments. He owns. He owns every one of the companies. How much of Twitter did he buy? All of it. Steve Jobs had two Investments when he died, Apple and Pixar. Warren Buffett started with one, took a bigger position. His position grew, so he ends up with more money, so he wouldn't bought a second cup and right. Okay. And he bought a major position. Major. Like he's got major long-term positions in these companies. And then what did he do? He started raising money. That's the other thing people should be doing. People should be raising money. Communities of people should be gathering to raise money together, to be partners. That's what the middle class didn't do. I don't want any partners. I don't want any employees. I want to keep it all for myself. I want to stay small. I'm going to dream big, but I'm going to stay small. And they don't, dude, they partner. Look up, Warren's never started a company. He doesn't manage anything. Every company he buys, he takes a major position. They all cash flow. He understands the company. He does not buy trends ever.
No trends.
Never. never touches a trend. He jumped into Apple. I think Apple was 22 years old when he jumped into it. He didn't jump in early.
Are there any trends you think that are happening right now that people should invest in that you think could take off over the next 5, 10, 20 years?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a trend. You know, they're gonna suck so much money out of so many people. Right. So everybody's gonna go jump on the AI, AI is gonna be the next thing and I gotta get my money in. Okay. you still need people. Right. So, you know, AI comes out, I don't, I just start using it. I start playing with it. How does it work? How can I make it work? You know, what does it say about me and Lewis House? Let me see what it says about me and you together. What are similarities between Grant Cardone and Lewis Howse? Okay, Grant Cardone and Lewis Howse are both successful entrepreneurs and authors who have achieved success through hard work, determination, and passion for helping others. Wow. Maybe people didn't know that about me. One similarity between the two is their focus on personal development. That's what you were talking about. And the importance of mindset. Both believe the success starts with developing a positive and productive mindset. Have written extensively. Both have written extensively on this topic. Another similarity is their commitment to helping others.
Interesting.
It's exactly what you said at the beginning of this. Okay. I just did this. So like, you saw me do it, right? Yeah, yeah. I didn't write this. Right. they both have created successful businesses and authored books and aim to inspire and equip others with the skills and mindset necessary. Finally, they both have a strong presence of social media and their platforms to connect with and engage their audience on a personal level. Both are known for their authenticity, transparency and willingness to share their struggles and challenges in order to motivate and inspire others. That's pretty accurate. Yeah. So, you know, that that's what I do. I figure out how to use something. I think people are going to over.
Invest in over commit to this and think it's going to solve all the problems in the universe. you think it's more of a trend? Yeah, I do. Some people get wealthy off of it, but not.
Yeah, a handful of people. The people in Silicon Valley, they're going to go raise money from JP Morgan, who's going to get a $200 million slug. And JP Morgan is going to make whatever percentage they get. Like, JP Morgan just bailed out Republic. They're guaranteed $5 billion. Wow. Nobody knows this. Oh, JP Morgan saved the bank. JP Morgan is going to make $5 billion. and they're guaranteed against all losses up to 90 billion.
Wow.
So there's no risk. This is the inside guys continue to basically chop up all the good stuff. So the big winner is going to be the big major players that should be inspiration to people. Don't stay small. You got to get big. How do you get big? Do what they're doing. they raise money, they have partners, you know, they spend a lot of time and energy building up a brand. They connect and network with one another. They help one another.
A lot of it is understanding how to build relationships with people. This is what you've done over the last 15 years. This is what these big banks are doing. They're building relationships. And so what I'm hearing you say is we got to be putting ourselves out there to meet the right people that can support us.
Exactly. so I had to go trade time three or four days of my life and a hundred grand to go to that, to go get in those rooms, which is uncomfortable for me. I, you know, I'm walking in. Nobody knows me here. I'm not a banker. I'm not a JP Morgan. I'm not, I'm an Instagram guy buying some real estate, you know, a scavenger just trying to pick up the, pick up the leftovers, whatever they spill. I'm trying to go grab. Sure.
You know, until I can grab enough.
To where they're like, how much you got?
Right.
So, so like when I got there, I had to literally walk in a room. I had to spend a morning figuring out my pitch. When I get introduced to somebody.
What do you say? What is the pitch?
What do I say?
Yeah.
What do you say?
Because the first time I met somebody there in a party, they're like, what do you do? I said, I do a lot of things. And I thought to myself, that ain't good opening.
Right.
I do a lot of things. This makes you sound like you don't do anything. Or you do a lot of bad things. Right, right. so by. By the next morning, I sat down with my team and I said, hey, guys, I need. Who am I on this Milken Institute? To this community, to this audience. Who am I? And I literally wrote in my phone, okay, I crafted out my little pitch, because what am I going to tell these people? I don't know what they do.
So you're meeting people from all over the world there. You have no idea.
They could be. I don't know who they are. They could marry. They might know me. They might not know me, but they're like, what do you do? Right? So you see where my note is. I'm a private fund manager, $4 million of multifamily real estate. I have a small business incubator, online education business that does $100 million. I'm the founder of regenerative health business called 10X Health System. So the next time, like literally one of my guys that's connected in the space that kind of put this whole thing together. The first time he heard me say, I do a lot of things, I said, bro, I need some help crafting my pitch. Literally like two hours later, somebody said, what do you do? And I hit him with that. He's like, boy, that was a fast pivot.
Wow.
Your friend, your partner. And Brandon Dawson, my partner with Cardinal O'Neil Ventures, right? He's like, what a pivot that was. 'Cause then the conversation when he said, oh yeah, tell me about your regenerative business. Tell me about your real estate business. Tell me about how you raised money. So the conversation could extend itself. But it was my opening. And the point of that story was, look, when you go into a new.
Environment, the reason people don't go into.
New environments is 'cause we're all scared.
They don't know what to say.
They don't know how to react. Dude, I don't know how to shake a hand. I don't know how to meet somebody. I don't know how to get a business card. I don't know how to break the ice.
Like everybody. Do you have a problem with it?
No, I do.
Because I because I because I used to have a problem with it. Yeah, yeah, got it. And I put myself in rooms every week.
Yeah.
And embarrassed myself for years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Until I got better at it.
Yeah.
So there's a period where I felt when I would enter rooms, I was in my mid mid twenties.
Yeah.
And I started to get into these kind of social media networking events and business conferences. I knew nothing about business.
Yeah.
And I was the youngest one there always. So I would enter and I made it more about not how can I be interesting, but how can I be interested in the right questions and get them talking. The more they were talking with me, the more they found me interesting. And I just figured out, okay, what do they need? What's their pain? What's their challenge? Do I know someone that could help them? Because I didn't think I could do it. I didn't have the skills yet. I didn't have the talent or the experience. But who do I know who can help this person overcome their pain? And by doing that, I became the champion of their problem. I helped them overcome it. And then I became more valuable. Yeah. They're like, oh, Lewis has helped me with this. What else can he help me do?
Yeah.
And how can I help him?
Yeah.
That's what I did. But for a couple of years, it was embarrassing. It was uncomfortable.
It is so, like, I didn't know what to say.
I'm 20 years old. It's exhausting, dude.
That's a lot.
But relationships, I was just talking about this the other day, that relationships are how I've built my business. It's how I've generated money, it's how I built my business. The relationship we have with guests who come on the show, if they want to open up or not, based on a relationship, the energy we connect, we create, the relationship with the audience, people watching or listening. Have I developed a good enough relationship with the community? Do they trust me? Do they feel like it's a safe space?
Do they feel like they learn and get value?
If not, they're not gonna come back. That's right. Relationship to people that buy stuff or come to my events or buy my books, like I've got to add value in relationships and know what the person wants and figure out how to help them overcome their challenge. That's the way I look at it.
Yeah.
But there's a lot we can learn.
Yeah. It's just in these environments where there's four or five thousand people. Yeah, that's tough. And you're moving through them, you know, it's quick. And everyone's looking around. Yeah, like I run into Byron Allen. Okay. Byron's worth. I don't know, two or $3 billion. I remember him when he didn't have anything. He was in Hollywood Hills, you know, well, he just bought a hundred million dollar piece of property in Malibu. So my opening with him was Byron, Hey, congratulations on that piece you scored in Malibu. And he's like, dude, Cardone, right? I watch your Instagram, man, but my opening, right? He's like, didn't you buy the place on Carbon Beach down the street? So we had, we had that thing, right? and then he's gonna be like, what do you do? Because we hadn't seen each other in 12 years. In 12 years, this guy went from nothing to a couple billion dollars. He's a different guy.
He changed.
You're a different guy too. I'm a different guy. Yeah. Right. But now I still gotta tell him who I am today because he might remember me from that other guy.
Right.
That I used to be.
That old identity.
Yeah. Oh, weren't you in car sales? Well, it doesn't matter what I was in. What am I doing now? Right. So it's like, I think a lot of people don't One, we don't get in the right rooms. That was the right room for me. Okay, it's the room I have to be in now.
Then they're not prepared when they're in the right rooms. Then they're not prepared.
But you weren't, initially you weren't prepared. No, I wasn't thinking about it. I knew, I knew, that's why I feel awkward being there, right? I feel nervous being there. And that's why sometimes I'll project to people too much confidence, because I'm trying to cover up this ego or something. Yeah, whatever. You know, I got my little strut going, you know, my defensive posture, right? Trying to protect, trying to do whatever I'm trying to do. And because I'm still coming from this little think, you know, that I was brought up with.
What is it that you know different about money today 15 years later than essentially when I met you when you turned 50?
Yeah.
What do you know differently about money now after these last 15 years of experience? Ups, downs, big wins, some big losses and lessons. what would you say to that 50 year old?
What would I say to him? Oh, my God, man. What would I tell him? Dude, first of all, I would tell him, bro, take a lot of photos when you're 50. Because no matter how you feel like you look when you're 50, 15 years from now, you're going to look back and say, I look good, you know? So take a lot of photos, whatever age you are right now, take as many as you can right now of yourself with the people that you love. to care for get as many photos as you can so you can look back later. That's one thing I would tell everybody. That's interesting. Yeah, I, I, I mean, I had that cognition the other day on the money game. It should have never been 10x dude.
Well, it should have been 100.
I always said it should have been 100x, but I did 10x because people couldn't think with it. Yeah. So, but, but really, you know, I was thinking too small back then.
Really?
I'm still thinking too small. I'm telling you. Yeah, I'm just telling you.
You're thinking bigger than back then.
Oh, yeah, 100, but I'm still thinking too small, right?
But I'm also curious, like, if you overthink, let's say I'm a 1000x right now, and you're not prepared for that type of wealth or pressure or experience or opportunity, then is that too big, too fast?
No, you should still think bigger because you're not going to know thinking smaller, right? You're not going to know, you're not never going to get there.
Right.
I mean, look, the guy thinks too small and he wins a billion dollar lottery ticket and he got lucky. He's got problems too. He's just got new problems. He doesn't know what to do with the money. Right. So if I would have thought bigger, I don't have the problem of not taking action. Okay, so I'm not, I'm not that guy. I'm not, you got to deal with whatever you got, right? But I know this, if I thought smaller, I would have taken fewer actions. When you start thinking really big, you have to, if you're going to go get this thing, if you're serious about whatever that thing is, I didn't think, I thought here because I thought, I was thinking, oh yeah, that's achievable. But how can a child, a three-year-old, think that they can pick up, 100 pounds or ride a big horse? They can't. It's like not achievable. until daddy picks him up, puts him on it, and he's like, oh, I can ride a horse. You know, I can ride it. But, but he, when he's looking up, he's like, I can't do that. Yeah.
Right.
So when you're looking from, you don't have anything and you're just hungry, it's hard to dream, man.
Yeah.
Because, because your stomach's saying, pay attention to me or pay attention to my kids or shoes or whatever, whatever your, your, your crunch is. Oh, inflation, cost of bananas. This is this, this is a fear cycle, man. This is like, It's them marketing fear to us to stay small so we become consumers, not doers. Consumers are worried about inflation. Investors want inflation. Producers want inflation. Business owners want inflation. If you got a career and you got talent, ball players want inflation. If you own a sports team, you want inflation. If you own real estate, you want inflation. But we're being told it's bad. Why? Because they're treating you. They're messaging to you as a consumer. Social media is bad for you. It is bad for a consumer. It's not bad for a creator. Right. See what I'm saying? So I'm trying to get on the cause point, the source point of like, okay, I should have been thinking about how do I build a $50 billion business?
15 years ago.
Oh, 100%.
Really?
100 billion.
Okay, what would you have done differently?
I would have studied a hundred billion dollar businesses. who did that? I should have been studying Jamie Diamond this whole time. I should have been studying Warren. What did they do? Not what do they say in their bull interviews? Because I've seen these guys on panels and then I've had dinner with them. Right. And bro, it's two different conversations.
They speak differently.
Oh yeah. Well, one's for the Graham, you know, one's for the audience. for the, for the clip. And the other is like, hey, let's go, let's go carve this deal up.
This is how we make money in here.
How big could this get? They're always talking about how big can you scale this thing? So, like our 10x Health System, if you saw Dana White, we got Dana on the program a couple years ago. He went freaking nuts with it. Okay? I mean, but, like, he's like, Grant, it's a 50 billion dollar business by itself. I guarantee you, Grant. he's like, you give me a piece of this company, you know, if you can give me on the next, the next race, and you, you know, you want to make, I'll be an investor in your company. He's like, this is if I've ever seen a $50 billion business, this is one. So that, that's what we look for. I didn't have 10XL system last time I was here. Right. I don't think we had it.
No, maybe you're just starting.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that, that's what I would have done, dude. I would have, I would have, you.
Were studying people that have.
I would have picked a Target. Okay. Like, maybe somebody wants to be you. What? I want to be like Louis. Okay, well, okay, he wrote books. I gotta write books. Okay. He got a. He does an event every year. He's got to do that. He does a podcast.
You'd have to do those things to become you.
But people, anybody that set their sights on you would be thinking too small. They'd be thinking too small. 100. They should have gone to. I want to be Oprah, you know? But they said, I can be Lewis. Okay? Lewis is achievable for me. You pick the fruit off the tree, you can see. You know, we, for whatever reason, my regret is that I didn't say, bro, I'm going to go to the top of the tree. In fact, I'm going to own the whole orchard. Wow. Or even the entire forest. You know, and I'm going to really make a difference. I'm going to be that Rockefeller JP Morgan, I'm going to be legacy 300, 400 years of dynasty kind of legacy thinking. This is the biggest regret of my life.
Really?
Yeah. Because I know I could have done it. Like, it kills me. When I see these guys in these meetings, I'm like, when I was using drugs at 17 years old, if my mom said, Hey, why don't you learn how to play golf? and I didn't do it. I don't play golf. Such a mistake, man. Really, because those people are connected. Golf courses, country clubs. Then I would have probably redirected. I should have gone and got a real finance career from a business school. I wouldn't be Grand Cordon, though. I would be somebody else. I wouldn't be the Grand Cordon I found now. I'd be some other version of this. But if I would have not done the drugs, got connected, done a Harvard kind of thing, ended up on Wall Street, as long as I didn't have a drug problem. And if I'd have got a drug problem and done all that, I could be in jail, right? But, going to Harvard, had a clear head, worked on my spiritual kind of thing, that might have thrown me off too though, because see, the capitalist thing, it's a material world, bro. It's not very spiritual. There's not a lot of like, there might be people praying there and asking for forgiveness, but there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of, like.
How can someone be spiritual? How can someone be spiritual and also be financially abundant at the same time?
Well, I, I mean, I am. Yeah.
But how do they, I don't know.
I've done it in that world, though, because that world is about pushing money. You're pushing, you're trading money. They get paid on this.
You're not creating value.
There's no value. Dude, there's nobody helping anybody. Okay. There's no, like, come I have helped millions and millions of people. Like that is a wealth, I can't put it on my net worth statement, but spiritually that wouldn't have happened for me at JP Morgan or any of those places. I'm not saying those people don't help people, but they don't help the number of people I've helped.
So in 15 years, you got to 4 billion in assets, right? For your real estate holdings.
And didn't let the other business go. I mean, the other business grew too.
Right, exactly. The other businesses are growing too.
Yeah. Yeah, that business is probably worth today. It could probably worth as much as real estate. Wow.
It's big.
Yeah, because we're now bringing other companies in.
And you're building on it. You're acquiring and building other companies.
Yeah. So there's an incubator business right now that's got about $1.4 billion worth of revenue coming through it. that we're managing, we're gonna continue to add to that. That could be 12 billion in the next little bit. What would it take for you to.
Go, you know, for the next five years from 4 billion to 40 billion?
Yeah.
In five years.
What would it take for you in terms of thinking, your ability to think differently? Yeah, just target, man.
First I gotta have the target, clear target.
Is that the goal, 40 billion?
Like when we did the webinar, okay? When you showed me how to do the webinar, first thing I asked, what's the target? I wrote a book, I did a book deal with Audible and Amazon. I'm like, what's the target? They're like, we really don't do it like that. I'm like, okay, well then I don't know what to do. I need a target. I need a target, bro. Specific target. So I would say, okay, I'm gonna do $40 billion in five years. Okay, in five years. That means I need to add $8.
Billion a year for five years and.
You have four billion total right now. Or I need to go buy one company $40 billion right now. and then I need to partner with, how do I do that? I don't have enough money to buy a $40 billion company. I could though. I could because there's gonna be a crash. So we're walking into crash zone. This is, it's gonna happen. So, so it would actually make it faster. Maybe God's gonna give me a gift and say, Hey, you ready dude? You got the mindset. Are you looking? Are you paying attention? I'll serve it up to you. Okay. Now we're gonna go into massive contraction with commercial real estate. in America, we're going to have probably three or four times the bankruptcies across the country than we've ever had. We're probably going to see unemployment spike. We're going to see more banks fail without a doubt. You know, just market here, we've seen three banks fail in the last 40 years. There's never been only three banks fail ever. There's been 300, there's been 900, there's been 600. There's never been three bank failures. Wow.
Ever.
They don't come in threes.
So you know how people die?
They one guy dies, second guy dies, third guy dies. Banks never die in threes.
So there's more to that to come down.
So what would it take? I would have to have a target. Whatever the target is, 40 million. If somebody's like, I want to be a millionaire, boom, get a target. Number one, real target. Two, do math on it. How many different ways could I do that? So there's got to be a math path, a math way, not a pathway, but a math way, right? I could do one deal, 40 billion. I could do five deals at 8 billion. I could do 41 billion deals. That's a little harder. I got to do 40 deals, right? It's easier actually to do fewer deals. Three, who do I need to meet? Who, not what, not what do I need to do, who do I need to meet? to serve me up that $40 million deal because there's gonna be a person and that's the thing that people miss. It's always a who, it's not a what.
That's not a what?
Now what do I need to learn? I don't need to learn. What do I need to manufacture? Okay, I didn't start a health company, I bought one. I didn't start a HVAC company. We basically, HVAC is a massive growing business right now, okay? So heaters and air conditions. So we're basically, we're incubating a bunch of them. And we'll probably take those public.
You're buying them.
Yeah, exactly. We're bringing them in, we're managing them. I'll help market for them.
Interesting.
But I didn't start one. I'm watching what Warren did. Warren didn't start a company. Elon did not start Tesla.
Really?
No. So.
He bought a technology.
Bill Gates did not start Microsoft. He did not write the code. He bought it. And then he marketed it.
Buy then build.
Yeah, buy it and then build it. Don't start it from scratch. How many guys you know, I'm gonna start my own business. Well, most of them fail. Yeah, exactly. And there's 32 million small businesses in America. Nobody's saying, I need another small business. Nobody's asking for that. Like you said, hey, I wanna find out what people want. Nobody's saying, I want my town to.
Have another small business. Yeah, it's so hard to start a business.
That's crazy, dude. So hard to start. And in this cycle, I believe people could buy 10 businesses for in the same sector, for less money than it would take to buy to start one business. And those 10 businesses would have brands already, advertisers, customers. Yeah. Yeah. An owner that's tired, a customer base that's already a product line that's, it could be 10 laundromats or 10 cosmetology centers. And if you could figure out how to bring those together and organize them, and you could have 10 businesses in 2023, right? with a very little money outlay.
So we got target plus math plus target.
Who do I need to meet? Who do I need to meet? Now hold myself accountable to start making those contacts to do this 40 billion dollar thing. Notice I don't have any money in there. I haven't figured out, well how much money do I need? I don't need any money. Really? Nobody needs money. money is a money's already a why do I need money when there's too much money already? There's so much money. They said we have inflation. Everybody says we printed too much money. Okay, then why do I need to worry about making more of it? It's already done. Who's got it? Who do I need to connect with? I'm telling you, man, these guys at the top of the food train, they, they, they're not operators. They're connectors.
They're not day-to-day running a business.
They don't do anything. They move this from here to there and they pick up a, they pick up a billion dollars of fees right here.
So if you, is 40 billion the target for you?
Is that, well that would get, 40 billion would be the real estate target. Right.
Is that the target?
Is that, do you feel like that's the target for you there?
Yeah, I think we can do the.
Same in the other business. Sure. Do you think it's, I mean, look if Daner's right, I can do, 40 or 50 billion out of the health. Right. And if Brandon's right, we could probably do another 30 or 40 billion off.
The, of the business, education business and everything.
Or the business education and consulting business.
Like, but real estate's the thing you're most excited about, right?
I mean, real estate is, is the thing that I think I'm going to have a big opportunity here. I mean, I just love real estate and I know real estate and it's been good for our investors and sure.
So if that's the target, is 40 billion the target or is there a bigger target?
40 billion. 40 billion is a good target.
Five years, man.
Five years is that would be, that would be fast. I mean, in a world of possibilities.
I mean, dude, if I could do that in five years, it would be, it would be, let's say that's the target.
Yeah.
You got the math.
Yeah.
And who do you need to meet?
Yeah.
What would you do then over the night? And let's just predict this is happening.
Yeah.
Put it in your mind that it's happening within five years. Okay. It's 20, what is it? 8.
2028, right? 2028. Yeah.
I bought a company. What have you done?
I bought one company.
What have you done?
You bought one company.
So what I did was I started.
Going out saying, hey guys, I want to go from 4 billion to 40, I want to go to 50, I want to buy $50 billion for the real estate. I either want to acquire a company, I want to acquire deals, I want to find broken deals, I want to provide debt on deals. I know there's gonna be a bunch of damage in the marketplace. I'm ready to go. So I start raising money to do that. And then I, but I gotta start talking to people. You can't just raise money and not talk to anybody. And the AI is not gonna go talk to people. These people are not gonna talk to AI. This world, I know the AI, everybody excited about it. For me to get a meeting with Jamie Diamond, it will not be an AI connection. okay? He's gonna want to meet me. Warren Buffett's not going to do an AI connection.
Right?
Okay. You don't, you want to meet Elon. You don't want to, you want to eat with him. You want to have, you want to sit down and have a weekend with him. You don't want to AI him.
How many people do you think you need to meet a year of the right people in order to do this?
Yeah, I think this is, it gets easier, not harder. you know, probably means I need, the next question is, what do I need to quit doing? What is that? Probably need to quit doing the events.
Really?
Yeah, I came to doing 100 events a year. Can't keep being available to everybody for everything. I mean, you speaking at events. Probably need to quit doing Instagram and Facebook and some of that stuff. I don't want to get rich. Look, I don't want to get bored and- Dude, I don't, I want to have fun. That's the problem with that story I told earlier about if I'd have gone to Harvard and you've been bored. I don't think I'd like who I am.
Now here's the thing, here's what I'm hearing you say.
Yeah.
You gotta stop doing the events. Yeah. This is where you meet people sometimes.
But maybe it's not the right event.
I need to go to their events.
Got it. So you need to stop. I need to pay, I need to be the spectator now, not the.
No, no, no. TT Barnum. Gotcha. So you need to stop speaking at.
All these conferences and be in hosting events and things like that. Maybe we stay with our one big event. Now, I mean, I'm gonna say this, our one big event, it's so big. and we spend so much money there that, that a lot of these people know me because of those events. Right. They, they are like, oh, I saw you with that guy, and I saw you with that guy, and I saw you that guy.
And that's a brand Builder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
100. I mean, that's what Milken's doing.
He's doing a big event with the right people.
Yeah.
And they're all coming together.
So maybe it's a different type of an event.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
So I'm hearing, you know, you want to.
I might have to quit doing the Lewis house podcast. Although this is the thing that's jumping you sometimes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You'Re saying, you know, social media pulling back on Instagram and Facebook, but these are some of the actions that have gotten you to where you're at.
Yeah, exactly.
So what I'm hearing you say is sometimes the actions that have gotten you here aren't going to help you get to 100 ads.
That's right.
Right.
So if somebody has poverty, you know, you don't have anything, you need to start saving money.
Right?
You need to work, grind out, but at some point you got to quit being a saver and got to start being an investor. Most people, the middle class just stopped with saving. At some point you got to take the savings and you got to invest. And this is what happened was the trick of Wall Street was we're going to tell people, we're going to keep people unsure and we're going to tell them what to invest in. Because if you don't have confidence, you don't control your own money. So what we're going to do is we're going to create financial BlackRock, we're going to indoctrinate people to be financially scared.
So they'll buy our instruments.
Our products and services. They'll invest in the instruments we tell them to. So we're going to teach the American people to diversify their investments. That's going to be called an ETF. It's going to be a trillion, multi-trillion dollar business. Vanguard. Okay, BlackRock, these are trillion dollar biggest companies on planet earth. They control everything, bro. Yeah, every day you touch Vanguard and BlackRock somewhere. So because what they did was they built the 401K, the IRA and the Roth, okay? To say, hey, you can save, take a little bit of your check, start early. This is an indoctrination program. This is why I say people are not financially literate. They're indoctrinated to do exactly what the street wants you to do. It creates massive wealth for them, not you. so that's how I've created my wealth. I came out of that system. I I I realized I had been indoctrinated. I bought life insurance when I was 20. I had started investing in IRAs and Ross because I didn't have another vehicle. Well, I took all that money and I started buying the real estate, and I started getting control of my own. My own wealth building. I don't give my money to them. I put it straight in the deal. That's why we created Cardome Capital so people could invest in the asset and own the asset, right? And get the benefits of that asset. So you asked me what, why would I, what would I do different or?
Yeah, what would you have done? I mean, to go back to the original question, what would you have done differently 15 years ago? But in thinking of this five year plan, this five year target, yeah, no.
Well, yeah, this is what I was saying to you. At some point, when you start moving up, okay, you got to change. Just like if you were moving down, dude, you got to change what you're doing. If you're going down in life and things aren't getting better and your relationship's not getting better, dude, you got to change the relationship. Either you got to change, she's got to change, or it's got to change. Y'all got to change.
Yeah. So.
So when you. When you're. When you're single and you want to get married, you got to change, okay? You got to give something up. It's not you have to add something, you always have to give something up.
Really?
I have, I've never been able to go from here to there and not give up something. They got me here, it got me here. Like I was a great single guy, I knew how to do the single thing. Dude, I had a lot of fun. I had the house, I had the life, you know? But one day I said, I don't want to do this anymore. Everything I wanted I got, and I no longer wanted to do it. Be careful what you ask for. I was a playboy. I was digging in, I was having, but I didn't have kids and I didn't have a wife and I didn't have a partner and I didn't like that. And I was lonely even though I had somebody in my bed. And so, so one day I said, okay, I got to give this up. Now, that didn't mean I had to give up dating. It meant I had to give up the house I had, the place I lived, and I moved. and I went to where my wife would be. So, but I had to give something up. So if you, if you, if you're going to go from zero to a millionaire, when you get to a millionaire, you, if you want to go to the next level, you want to go to 10 million, you will have to.
Give up the millionaire life. What else do you think you need.
To give up to get to 40? 40, what would I have to give up?
All the events, social media, you know.
A lot of the behavior, a lot of my, probably a lot of my behavior. I got to start acting like these guys, got to give a bunch of blue suits. blue, blue, blue, blue shirts and some, you know, probably got to give up the hoodie. You know, I got to fit in, dude. Really? You know, I don't know if I could do that either.
Interesting.
So the problem is now it's like, why would I? Like, I'm gonna do this. I did it. I got this for being. See, that's what happens. The ego comes in and says, I don't need to do this. yeah, right. But. But then I got to decide how. That's why I said I got to hold myself accountable to the goal. Is the goal important enough? I'm gonna have to keep reselling myself on this goal. Dude, is it important enough? Why am I doing 40 million? Why does it even matter? What am I. Am I going to pass it on to Sabrina? Who's going to handle this when I. I'm not around to handle it. Do they even want to handle it?
Why?
Why are you doing it now? You've got so much money.
You've got.
I mean, why am I doing it? You know, you've got so much impact, influence, massive audience.
You're worth.
Billions in your business.
I could make a much bigger influence, Ben.
But you're already making a big influence.
I know, but I mean, bro, look, 40 billion, everybody talks to you now. You can start changing things. You can literally, you know, you can start swinging. You can start changing education, which needs to be changed. you got a megaphone. I had a party last week at our house in Malibu. Group called and said, Hey, want to put Rob Lowe on how to magazine cover? We know you just bought this house. We think it'd be a great location for our, would you be willing to do it? I'm like, yeah, the things you have, you know, like they may not mean as much to you as they mean to other people. But when other people don't know you and they walk into your things, the right kind of things, you know, it opens doors.
Interesting.
It could be good or bad. They could come in and try to take advantage of you, or they could come in and say, wow, man, you put all this, you know, I want.
To learn more about you.
Yeah.
They become interested. You know, there's that thing you were talking about, about you weren't trying to be interesting. You were, you know, you'll be interested in them. A way to do that is to be interesting on what you've done. 'Cause power does move to, you know, these people that I want to influence, that I'm gonna need to make this next move. You know, what do they want? Hey man, I got my place in Malibu. You wanna hang out there for the weekend? Here's the keys.
Sure.
I want to give them something they don't have. Here's the keys to the house. Here's another special key over here to the wine cellar, you know, and it's stocked ready for you, you know, and I got somebody to clean the house for you. Those are little perks in life that they don't, that my mom didn't tell me about, that I wasn't thinking about, that the middle class is not funding, you know, my daughter's with me. She's hanging out with me, you know, so. I didn't think about that when I was most like one of the most valuable things is for me to go travel with the kids to have them with me while they're growing up. And so, but that means they got to be homeschooled. That means they probably need a tutor. All this costs money. Now I need another hotel room everywhere we go or two. Okay. If I'm actually going to be really successful, I might need security for them or me, not for me, for them more. Really, I'm just worried about losing them. You know, so it gets like these are things we don't budget for, dude. Like most of the people watching right now, everything you have budgeted for in your life, you can pay for. It's the things you didn't budget for, the big dream. But everything else, you got covered. Everything people pay attention to. house note, car note, electric bill, water bill, basics, everything gets covered. What if you just added a whole bunch of other stuff to the list? What if we were all brought up to say, hey, we're going to cover all this stuff. People will be even more productive.
What would you say are the top three ways, the best ways to multiply money then?
Get rid of it. You got to get rid of it. First you got to make it. I mean, I got to collect it. I got to collect some. then I got to figure out, okay, this pays for this basic living. If the cup is the basic living, I'm not. Everything above that, don't spend any more money. Like the rest. The rest of it. If this is four grand and I make seven, the entire three has got to go into Investments every month. Every single month. You know, no weekends, no out playing out, no trips in the beginning. Like, if you want to create real wealth, what period of time do I have?
You have 20 years.
20.
Yeah, 20. I mean, I don't need 20. 10 years. 10 years. 10 years.
You.
You. You.
You.
You gotta have. Don't improve the quality of your living.
The quality of your life for 10 years or for the first few years.
Probably for 10.
Wow.
I mean, if you want to get rich, right?
And.
But let's say you're 20 years old and you want to be rich by the time you're 30. Dude, that's totally dual.
Yeah. What? You're gonna have to pay some kind of price. what's the the 10 year wealth generating master class that you would teach people on after 20 to 30 or 25 to 35. So what would you do for 10 years?
Your goal should be in the top 1% earners in the country. That's $823,000 a year.
823,000 a year.
$823,000 a year. That should be your first target. If you're a waiter, waitress, I know I know people in every space.
It's a lot of money.
You know, let me see how much money it really is. $823,000 a year divided by 12. See, everybody goes to think about what they can do now, but it's not about what, it's about who.
Okay.
Okay, divided by 12, $68,000 a month divided by, we know that much money is available on the planet, right? Sure. Okay, divided by, what is that, 30 days divided by 24 hours divided by 60. It's $1.58 a minute.
$1.56.
$1.58 a minute.
$1.58 a minute. Okay.
So I'm gonna do the math. It's called the math way.
Yep.
Not the pathway. The math way is the pathway. I need to make $1.58 a minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
So that's 823,000 roughly.
Yeah. So that basically says, oh, I gotta automate my time. I gotta automate. I gotta make money while I sleep. This is what we should have been taught in school, man. this is what we should have been taught as kids. Like, how do I do money? You do it with time, okay? You don't do it with a job. You're not gonna get, you're not gonna get $823,000 a year at a job. There's no job that's gonna hire you and pay you 823 without you having to go back to college and spend time and invest money. Just doesn't work like that. So I'm like, okay, where can I get $1.58?
A minute.
A minute. Or how could I get 823, 000 people to give me one dollar? That's the other way to do it. So what I'm gonna do is do a bunch of different math ways. I'm gonna do, like, maybe 12 or 15 different ways to get this much money. Notice I'm following the money right now. I am not doing anything.
I'm thinking about how people need.
What do people need? What's the product? What's the service? What's the idea? What am I passionate about? Dude, I'm just tracking money now. I'm hunting money. I'm hunting a number.
Right?
All I'm doing is breaking the number down. Okay.
Okay, so- you-'re 25 or 30?
Yeah, I could make, I could get 823,000 people to give me $1. I could get 82,000 people to give me $10. I could get 8,236 people to give me $100. I'm like, this, I could actually do this. I could get 83 people or 80, 830 people to give me $1,000. you think that's doable? Yeah, 100%. There's eight billion people on the planet. Can I get 830 people to give me 1000 bucks? Okay, for what? What would they give me $1,000 for? They might just give it to you as a gift. I don't even have to build anything. If I could reach enough people, could I get 836 people to say, would you loan me $1,000 for the next 10 years? I'll pay you back in 10. It's all about who knew, okay? So now I'm like, oh, now I need to start marketing my name. I need people to get to know who I am. Then I back in the product. Okay. What do these people want? What do they need? So that's what I would do. Okay. Now out of the $823,000, if I actually achieved it, I know it's achievable. I've done it myself. If I did that one year, then the next year, I'm gonna be like, how can I do that in six months? okay, the next year, how can I do that in one month? If I do that in one month, I'm gonna be like, how can I do that one week? And then one day I'm gonna be like, how can I do it in a day? Wow. I've done all that, by the way. I woke up to that this morning. That's crazy.
That exact number.
So that's when I had breakfast. I said, okay, it's time to get up.
Wow.
Because I gotta go work hustle the next day. Right. Okay. So, so now what do I do with the money? Right? Let's say, let's say I can live on $70,000 a year, $80,000 a year. I'm not spending any the 80,000, anything above the 80, 720,000. This is the advice I gave Aaron Judge. You earn 40 million a year, spend none of it, invest all of it, live off your endorsements. Wow. Do not spend any of your earned income. Do that for 10 years, it's gonna be another level.
Bro, he would be worth, he would.
He would take 40 million, he would buy a billion dollars worth of real estate every year. 40 million, he'd buy $100 million worth of real estate every year. In 10 years, he'd have a billion dollars worth of real estate.
Wow.
That is probably worth two or 3 billion, his income from that when he retires. By the way, his contract's over now. He'll be 40 years old. He's useless to the major, maybe he's an announcer. Okay? And he gets an announcing deal for half a billion in the 10th year. The tax deduction he would get from the 10 years that he invested that money would offset the half a billion dollar ESPN deal.
Right?
But he would be getting 40 billion, 40 million a year, 400 million. He'd be earning $24 million a year from the passive income, but he'd have $2 billion worth of assets if anybody can track that math. And that's what I would do. So back to the guy making 800.
Yes.
Now the person watching this, she's a waitress and she's got two kids at home. She's like, I'm never gonna make 800. It's 'cause you already gave up on the idea. like you never, you never, you never said, that's the target. And you keep thinking you got to wait tables and you quit already. So that, that, that's the mistake I made, dude. Like, the first mistake I made was nobody said, hey, man, you could make a billion dollars a year if you wanted to. You don't have to make a million.
That was never the target for you.
No, all the, all the books, all the books, everything we're told was to be a millionaire. you know, be a millionaire or just make enough money to be happy or just make enough money to pay off all your bills or you got to reduce your spending. You know, everything is about don't go get coffee, you know, buy used truck, don't get debt. Everything's about what not to do rather than what to do, what you can do. The financial planners tell you what not to spend rather than telling you how do I create wealth for myself?
What's the dark side of making a lot of money? because there's a lot of people that want more money, but there's also a lot of wealthy people that we hear about who have horrible lives.
Yeah, yeah.
They don't have great relationships. Their kids hate them.
Yeah, yeah.
The third wife or whatever it is. Yeah, they're unhealthy, they're sick. What is the dark side of money and extreme wealth that you've seen around some of these incredible individuals, but also what you've seen with your wealth?
Yeah, I'll tell you personally. Personally, like, you know, Now, the dark side is, okay, more responsibility. The threat of looking like an idiot if things go wrong. Oh, you f*ck it up. A lot of responsibility, dude. People, we have, I don't know, 600 employees now. You know, if you screw it up, that's a terrible one. It's haunting. every night I go to sleep with that, screw it up, mess it up. You know, people don't like people that are rich, man. Like, there's a lot of projection on, on, on the group.
So.
I don't.
Do enough for other people. you know, what have you done for us? No matter what I tell them I've done, it's not enough.
Not enough.
Well, why'd you do. Why didn't you give more? All right. You know. You know, now. Now there. And then there's the. Oh, it didn't make me happy. Why did I do all this? Somebody gives. You know, I bought the house in Malibu. Most of the time we don't find time to go use it. I'm like, that doesn't feel good. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm like. I bought this and now nobody's got time to go see it. The kids are going to grow up, you know, they're going to bail out. They want to go do their own things and I'm stuck with the house. Nobody wants to come hang out with me and that didn't feel good. So there can be like, look, the loneliness was going to come either way in that situation, right? The like, who's with me? You get rich and you're still going to get old.
Right.
You know, you get, as you get older, things become more or less interesting.
Really?
Well, yeah.
How so?
It's just some things you can't do, dude. Like, you know, you know, just, you know, you just can't do them or things hurt or.
Right.
Body's breaking down or.
Yeah, dude, my break a shoulder. And I don't, I don't know. I don't know that that shoulder would have broken 10 years ago. I know it broke now, and now it's gonna probably take longer to heal, and I'm more of a about it, you know, come a goddamn I heard my mama. Now, I. Who knows? I could have done that when I was 40 or 30 or whatever. Right. But I know when you're 25 years old, you're healing faster. Yeah. Producing more of everything. So, you know, look, money doesn't stop any of that stuff. so anybody that thinks you're going to feel younger because you're richer, I don't know that that's true. You know, you either have, you're either excited about life or you're not, you know? So I think you get a lot of, like I did it the other night, I was watching this guy, he's worth $8 billion and he's running this thing. And I'm like, that's, if that's how you act when you get a billion, I don't know if I want it, right? Well, that was me doing exactly. what I've seen other people do to me.
Really?
Yeah. But it was weird. I was at this event and dude, the thing was weird. I was like, I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. But the first thing I did was I made it about his wealth rather than maybe he's just a weird dude.
Right. Who has money.
And he's worth eight.
That's not how he got there.
No, maybe he's always been weird for what I know. But I kind of projected the wrong, kind of put the wrong meaning on it.
Right? So.
Now, what I've seen with other people is the drugs, the prostitution, the extremities.
Of it all, right?
Bro, it's like endless. The amount of dissatisfaction, you know, the appetite for pleasure, which doesn't look like pleasure, and the out ethics and the, But, but, but I've seen that at the broke level too. So it's just on a yacht now.
Rather than it's just more extreme.
It's more, more, everything's more extreme. The, the people that use you and just around you, the yes men kind of phenomenon, oh, you're the best, you know, nobody will tell the truth to them. That's terrible. Like, I don't, I don't have a lot of friends. I don't have a lot of people around me. Like, if you see me rolling around, it's always, a couple people. Yeah.
Your family and a couple people.
Yeah. It's not. I don't have groups of people around me.
What is it that the, the wealthy that you've seen when they get wealthier? What do some of them forget about in terms of, like, their mindset or their discipline? Are there certain things that they lose when they become wealthier?
I was, I was on Twitter spaces last night, and this lady constantly talking about, you know, how she pulled herself up from the bootstraps and how she made it. And it's like a complete disregard for people that are not white, that are, don't have connections, that weren't taught how to work hard, like, that are like, I'm like, like, like, Cindy, you're not, you're not. you're forgetting the rest of the world. Oh, no, God damn, why do you always say that? I'm like, I'm telling you, man.
I.
Had it easier than many people. I would not have what I had if I didn't work. But you can't just always go back to the work hard thing. There's a lot of unfairness. There's tremendous amounts of unfairness. And it's not just about, oh, I'm gonna work hard. Okay, but when are you gonna make a connection? how do you get into that connection? How do you get people to know who you are? Like it's not easy. And you just act like you could go out there and do it again today. Okay, let me see you go out and do it again today. You know? Well, yeah, but now I'm 50, Gary. I said, okay, well there's a lot of people out there that are 50 years old. They got to go do it today. But you just said it's easy.
We'll go do it.
That's why I did that show, Undercover Billionaire.
Yeah.
And so. But it's not easy, dude. It's not easy to connect with people. It's not easy to put it together. It's not easy to let have people bring you into their life and share time with you. I think wealthy people have forgot that, you know?
And.
And they're like, oh, I can earn. Like, she's telling me she can earn 5% of her money. I said, 99% of this room will never get 5% from a bank today. Oh, yeah, they can get it easy. All you got to do is go in and negotiate with the bank. You got 400 in a bank account. You ain't negotiating with the bank. Right. It's just ridiculous. She's forgotten that 64% of people in America don't have 400 bucks.
Wow.
In a savings account for an emergency.
What's the debt like for most people? How many people are in debt in America? Do you know that?
No, I don't know what the number is. I know that I think they just did a thing that said 40% of people that make a million dollars a year still are living paycheck to paycheck. 40%. 40% of people that make them 250 Grand a year are living paycheck to paycheck. People that make, it's like 40 of the people that were making a million a year or something said they were living paycheck to paycheck. But that, that's not because of inflation. That's because they spent money they shouldn't have spent. They thought they were entitled to because they're millionaires.
They live above their means.
They live above their Investments. not their means. Interesting. They lived in within their means, but never invested.
Right.
And thought that they were always going to be more valuable and more valuable. That's not how value works. Your value as a human being is going to go like this. Okay? It's going to go up. Whatever you're doing, you're going to go. Hopefully you get to go up. You don't go flat line the whole career. I mean, if you're a maid and you're, and you never got better at being a maid, you're going to be flat the whole time, right? But if you go from May to I'm going to own a series of you get more skills.
More skills now I own a company.
Your value is going to go up, but sooner or later your value is going to start arcing out. Why is that? Technology, you're getting older, you can't service as many people, you didn't grow your company and the value of your company or your talents, you're a baseball player, making 40 million bucks a year, sooner or later, bro, they ain't gonna pay you anything. Tom Brady, he was making a bunch of money, he's going to be paid more as a commentator. So he's going to have a boom, he's going to have a big spike because his brand is so much. Now, if he draws an audience, if he doesn't draw an audience, contract will be renegotiated and/or they'll kill him and his income will go down. But he should have been loading up on assets. I've always been preparing for this bell curve to do this. Well, grants no longer valuable to people. And it with the point where I'm no longer valuable, you got assets are going to be like, Boom. They'll kick my value up.
Interesting.
They'll catch up with my earned income and replace it.
Right?
And people should have that target. Your target should be not to make more money, but to have more money that you don't make to match what you do make.
From your investments.
Yeah, exactly. So I'm making 80 grand a year back in that example, 80 grand a year. and then I'm going to go to 800. Let's say you figure that out along the way. You're just accumulating assets with the other 700,000 so that one day your 800 grand that you're making now, you're making another 800 from income from the investments. So with that, when the first income goes away, the second that second layer of investments starts to pay you and your family. and that becomes your life insurance. That becomes your Keo 401k retirement plan. But you're invested in things that you own, not things Wall Street owns. And you get the tax write-offs they get. You get the benefits in the loopholes and the power. Right. And that's what I'm trying to teach my kids, you know, like Sabrina. So Sabrina is ordering food yesterday and she's like, she looked at the menu. I let her pay all the bills. I've been doing this since she was probably six. You pay the bill with your money, right? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You pay, you figure it out.
You do the- yeah, how much should the tip be?
Yeah, what's the tip? Okay, check the bill. Make sure you go through every item. Make sure we didn't overlook, I really don't care. It's just a good practical skill for her, right? She's like, Papa, they were supposed to take this off. Good, ask the lady to take it off. In fact, don't ask her, tell her. Just say, Ma'am, you need to take this off.
We didn't like it.
So I'm teaching her how to get stuff back. I'm teaching her how to confront people.
Like all the uncomfortable skills you gotta learn. How many people do you know that.
Are not willing to say, take it off? They're just like, yeah, yeah, I'll do it.
I'll do it.
I'm just like, yeah. So then I'm like, okay, Sabrina, now what do you want to tip these people? And then she'll be like, I think we should tip this guy 15%. I said, why is that? Because he was pretty good, but not great. Okay, next cut. I said, but listen, we like to eat at Nobu, right? So what you might want to do is hit him 15 and give the matrony 50.
Right. So we always get a table.
We always get a table and slip 50 in. So now she's learning these skills, right? But she called me yesterday. She said, Papa, the French fries at the Beverly Hills Hotel are $34. I'm not ordering. I said, yeah, you shouldn't. It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
I don't know if that's inflation or location.
By both.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's what I'm teaching, too. We don't give them money. We don't give them an allowance. I don't think any kid should be given an allowance. Interesting. Why not?
We.
We make them in. They want money. They become an employee of the company. They work for the company. We give them a series of things to do.
We pay them once a year.
Okay? We give them a big check at the beginning of the year. That money goes into card on capital. Wow.
And they live off the distributions. Come on.
Yeah, that's a.
It is.
That's cool. It's a tax write off.
Right.
So now, and then when they're 18 years old, they'll probably have, we're doing about 50,000 bucks a year for their salaries right now. Started 30. Wow. They said, how can I get a raise? I said, you can do more things. Next year they got 40. Now they're 50. Sometimes they'll get a bonus for doing.
Extra stuff, but they don't get the money. They never get the money.
It's invested and they get that money is invested, they get the distributions. I think they're $667 a month now. Wow. In cash flow. That's amazing. So when they want, hey, I saw this sweater. I like how much is it? 200. I said, good. How you want to handle it? Because I ain't got your money. Yeah. You know, so they're like, yeah, I want to buy this out of my out of my checking again.
Right.
Okay, good. And that they they feel better. Interesting.
Then I relying on you constantly to buy them stuff.
Let's say if they see something that's 800 and they only got 667. They're like, I don't have enough money. I said, well, why don't you point, let's do a loan. Let's do a deal. You can borrow $137 from me. So they do. I said, and then I'll just, I'll grab it from next month. I said, I got your asset. So you can find your assets over to you. You know?
Wow.
So when they're 20, they're gonna know they've never touched their capital. They will create wealth over the next 10 years, but it'll be their own wealth. It's not something I gave them. And I benefited by working with them. I have fun with them.
Wow.
Like they're taking all the Cardinal University stuff right now and they go in and watch, they review a video and then they do their version. So we're creating 10x Kids University.
Oh my gosh, it's amazing.
Right?
That's cool.
So kids can teach kids.
That's cool. Well, if you could only teach your kids, three lessons about money.
Yeah.
What would those lessons be?
People. Number one, meet. Meet people. No one's a stranger, you know? It's a. It. Money's a people game. Two, once you get it, don't lose it. And number three, and put it in something that's. That. That you're guaranteed. I saw you had a guest that talked about doubling money every year. I'm like, you know, it's like you're gonna lose money trying to do that.
Really?
Put 100. That's not, it's not even, you don't need to do that. If you earned, if you earn seven or 8% on your money and invested every year, you'll be so rich when you're, when you're, when you need it, you'll be rich beyond, if you don't lose any. So I would tell them number three is just invest in things where you can never lose your capital and, and, and stay away from, degenerates. and deadbeats and people that don't value money and degenerates basically are people that spend more money than they earn. They're degenerates, they're criminals by nature, by the way. Anybody that spends more than they have is a criminal. It's a violation of a spiritual law.
Even if they get a loan out or if they are investing in something.
You spend more than you earn, you are a criminal. you're a degenerate criminal. That's a spiritual rule. It's like, I don't need, I don't need the state of California to tell me what law I broke. I just broke a spiritual moral contract.
A contract. What about it, what about it getting a loan out and getting debt to invest in something that you can't afford?
Was it make money? Sure.
Okay.
Well then that's good, that's good. That's good. But I'm talking about somebody borrowing money to buy a Gucci belt because they want to show off because they want to be, look what I got. Got it. Or buying a Lamborghini. Because you're trying to impress somebody. Right, right, right. You know, you're a degenerate or going to the casino and playing and having alcohol and going to the strip joint, throwing away $5 bills that you can't afford. Like there's a lot of people that spend money they can't afford to try to be a big shot. Right. Men and women, by the way, it's.
Not just guys that do it. Yeah. What about the three lessons you would share? I feel like these are very practical lessons. Meet people, don't lose it. and put it in something that gets, you know, guaranteed returns and don't be around the deadbeats.
Stay away from the deadbeats. Right. Because they'll steal it all.
What about the three lessons around the emotional relationship to money and how people should think and feel about money? Because a lot of people are afraid of it. They feel uncomfortable. They don't talk about it.
Yeah.
They, you know, keep it to themselves. How can we shift the relationship to money that we have so we can have a better experience emotionally and spiritually about money.
Well, you got, you know, for me, for me, I got a, like anything I've ever had a problem with, okay? I had a problem with drugs when I was 23 years old. And then I'm hiding it. You know, anything you're hiding, you're gonna have problems with. The secret keeps you sick. You know, money is very secretive for most people. Just ask them what they make. and all of a sudden everybody goes, oh, I don't want to tell you that. The IRS knows what you make. Okay, like, I mean, everybody, you know, the people that you don't like know already what you make. Your boss knows what you make. You don't know what you make. Most people don't know what they make because they went into the secret. The drug addict doesn't know how much they use. The alcoholic doesn't know how much they drink. It's, they're not accounting for anything. You know, the relationship that goes bad, they're not inventory and why it went bad. so you got to inventory your money. I said this to you one other time. First thing I look at every day is my money. I know. First thing every day. I have a great relationship with my money.
Did you always have a good relationship with money?
I lost a quarter when I was eight years old. My dad gave it to me to get me out of the house. We walked down the street and I was playing with the quarter, flipping it like a. Like a. Did I tell you this story? And my twin brother's. He's playing with his, or he wasn't, but I was playing with mine, and I flipped it. Missed it and it went into a manhole and I couldn't get it. I couldn't retrieve it. My arm was shorter than the bottom, right? So I go back home, I'm crying. And my brother went to the store and he got bubble gum and I didn't freaking man. And my dad said, what'd you get? I said, Papa, I lost my quarter. And he's like, you, lost it? Man, he freaking got mad, bruh. Like, he, he like, what do you mean you lost it? I said, well, I was flipping it. never play with money, you know, and he just hammered me. I said, remember like it was yesterday, right? Never play with money ever. And I'm crying and I walk away. My grandfather grabbed me. Tony Neal came to this country on a boat. Never had papers to live here. Was a gambler his whole life. He said, son, let me tell you something. Old Italian guy. He says, you're dead. he's got a, he's got a, he's got a point about not playing with money. But there's another way to look at this. He says, never go anywhere with just one quarter. You might lose. And I was like, okay, he's like, think about that in your life. You have to make a decision between those two things. And so that's always like, don't play with it and never depend on one quarter, 'cause you might lose. So get a bunch of quarters, man.
Yeah, yeah.
'Cause you're gonna need it.
Right.
And if you don't lose it, the government's gonna grab it, they're gonna tax.
It, someone else is gonna inflate it.
They're gonna rob it, they're gonna steal it. So, you know, number one, I think I would just say the healthy relationship is look at it every day. Okay, two, inventory, your beliefs around money. I think most people are taught that money's bad. It's sinful. And three, I would never, I would not connect, I would not try to create any relationship between money and happiness.
Ooh.
You know, I don't know why anybody tries to attach any connection between the two. you know, when people say, hey, money won't make you happy, I'm like, they have nothing to do with one another. It's like me saying, I want to fly, and you saying, but you should swim or something. What's it got to do? What are the two things have to do with one another? I need money to pay bills. I need money to buy gas. I need money to help the Grant Corn Foundation out. I need money to buy a ticket to the Milken Institute. I need money and it's got not, I'm not, when I'm trying to make money, I'm not trying to be happy. And I don't, anybody that tries to put the two together, like, they're different conversations. They should not be, they shouldn't be talked about together.
If money, but if money doesn't buy happiness, what does get happiness?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I, I think that's everybody's like, Purpose for me gives me, you know, when I've done a good job, when I've helped somebody, that makes me happy. Yeah. When I go home at night, I'm like, hey, I worked hard today, right? That makes me happy. I didn't have to make any money. When I make good decisions for my family, that makes me happy. You know, I'm proud of myself.
So.
So money doesn't bring you happiness.
It's never made me happy.
Might make you feel more secure or.
Or most of the time it makes me a little more like, oh, okay, now what do I got to do? You know, but it doesn't make me like, it might make me proud, but it doesn't make me. I'm like, I don't get happy. If you gave me a billion dollars right now, I would be exhilarated. I would be intrigued. I would be I don't know that I'd be happy. Would you? If I gave you a billion, would you be like, oh, I'm happy. My happy meter went up.
Now I'm already happy.
Yeah.
So when it increased, it would give me probably a level of like a rush or an excitement of like, okay, what can I do with this now? Or how can I help more people? Or who can I hire?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I'm already a happy person.
Yeah.
So it might bring me energy or for a couple of days or a week or something, and then that would go away. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know.
Anybody out there, you got a billion dollars, you want to throw it down on me? We'll see if it makes me happier. But but we would be excited about it. We'd all be talking about it. We'd probably go have drinks tonight. You can believe this, man. Here's 10 grand, you know?
Right.
You're so cheap. Okay, here's the bull. It's gonna start now. Yeah.
You know, well, let me ask you about your happiness scale.
Yeah. Yeah.
When you were at 100 million. Yeah. Versus where you are now.
No difference.
In the four billion, you're at the same level of happiness.
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