"They Want To Keep You Poor!" (BIGGEST MONEY MYTHS) | Grant Cardone & Lewis Howes

Particularly Americans have the wrong data about money. There is financial misinformation in the marketplace that is perpetuated by the banks and the institutions because I think you got to have a dream. The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

A lot of people are afraid to invest because there's a lot of different investments. They don't want to lose money.

Yeah.

I don't want to lose money. You don't want to lose money. But why do you think people are afraid to just talk about money, to make decisions on investing money, They're scared to go earn more. Why are people afraid of money in general, do you think?

Well, yeah, I can tell you for me, like I was always scared of money, you know? And I was terrified of it. So, like if you look at, still today, like I look at the bill of everything.

It's a bill of everything.

If something calls something, I want to know how much it was. And so, like, how much is it? Like, I'm gonna ask that question, whether it matters or not. It doesn't matter where I get in my life, I don't think I'm ever gonna be free of.

How much was that? How much was the dinner?

How much was the dinner? How much was the tip? How much was the coat? How much was the jacket? What did, you know, me and Elena, like Elena's like, Hey, it's gonna be fine, man. Look at what you've done. We cannot spend this. And I'm like, How much was it? I wanna know how much it was because when I grew up, you had to know what things cost. Mm-. And so, the point your question about money is a terrifying thing because it's the one thing in life that, you know, the NFL is not gonna give me the ball and I'm never gonna get a chance to golf. I can't win in those environments, but with money, everybody gets money. It's the one place where everybody gets it and now what do I do? And I can lose it now. So it's a terrifying concept, like power. Very few of us ever get any kind of influence or power, right? Once you get it, you're like, Hey, what do I do with this? Am I gonna do it? Am I gonna do the right things with it? And so I think people withhold themselves because they don't, we're not educated about money. We don't know where it comes from. We have a lot of misinformation about it. Our parents terrified us. Money doesn't grow on trees. Save your money, it'll save you. All these things our parents told us because they were enamored are encumbered with the same kind of liabilities around money. I don't know how to get it. I don't know how to keep it. And the third, the worst part that we're all at is I don't know how to invest it. So what I'll do is I'll, some people get good at getting it. Very few actually. Fewer people at keeping it, but probably more than getting it. There's probably a big group in America that have learned how to keep money. 'Cause they're afraid to lose it. They don't wanna invest it, they don't wanna use it, they don't wanna, you know, Kanye talks about this, how white people, how white people save all their money, and they just keep it, they just store it. Like I had an uncle, he buried everything he ever made. It went in the backyard. Wow. The other uncle was, he was a guy that bought, he worked hard, very, very frugal, Italian descent, and he would buy real estate, but it was always buy low and sell high. He actually never sold anything. But that was the concept, buy low, buy the cheapest, lowest, get everything on a deal. If there's food stamps to be gotten, you go get those food stamps. If there's a government deal, get it. If it's section eight and the government will pay you, pay it. So both these guys, different kind of mentalities, were extremely frugal. My other uncle worked in a refinery. He basically saved all his money, paid everything off, got out of debt, that was their lifestyle. My dad died when I was 10. So he paid all his debt off, had everything paid. And so that's all I had, right? Everybody around me was like, get money.

Keep it.

Keep it, don't use it, you know, but you should invest, but nobody ever learns that third one. And so I think we're just a bunch of people walking around terrified of this apparent appearance of it's scarce.

Right.

And it's not. And, and, you know, it's not, there's nothing scarce about it.

Didn't they just print more in the last year?

We printed, we, we printed more, I think we printed more money since the last time I was with you than they printed in the last hundred years.

That's crazy.

Since I saw you last.

That's nuts.

So everybody should have got a pay raise. And I know, I know people are scared of the bubble right now. They're like, oh, my God, man, things are, things have to, real estate's too much. and stocks are too much. None of this stuff has gone up equal to the amount of money printing. So if the print is this high, you know, if the print is that high and inflation that we're hearing about all the time is this high, you'd have to assume it would have at least this far to go. But that's only because people don't understand when you print this much money, you need to multiply times nine. Because money, money's printed. When you take your money to the bank, when I take the money that you're gonna give me for this great interview today, and I take it to the bank, as soon as it goes into the bank, the bank gets notified, and the bank now has the ability to loan that money out nine times.

Nine times.

Nine times. So they don't keep money. Okay, so if you put a million dollars with the bank today, they're gonna go make $9 million worth of loans tomorrow.

That's how do they make that? How do they do it?

Well, that's what they're allowed to do by their regulations.

They can take a million dollars that you give them. That's why they want deposits so much. And then they can go give $9 million in loans on that one week. That's right.

Within a year, two years.

Within one second.

In one day, they can loan out $9 million. When you, this is what people don't understand. And this is what our parents didn't understand, okay? So Bob goes out, Bob or Betty goes out and they work and they make, they do really well and they make 200 grand a year. Maybe they're online doing online sales. Hustle, hustle, hustle, trading their most valuable thing. This is what I did for 25 years, from 25 to 51 years old. Spent my most valuable asset time to get money, terrified, terrified every second of every day. That's really what's driven me the whole time was terror. Like when you don't know, you're gonna be scared. So I'm going out to get money, I won't spend any of it. because I'm terrified if I can't, I don't know how to get more. I'm worried I can't keep getting more. So then I get the money and then I rush off and spend my most valuable asset time again to bring it to the bank.

And then they go multiply it.

Dude, they're telling me to save it and they don't. And so when I quit listening to every, everybody that's got an opinion about money online or my neighbors or my uncles, and I started saying, what are they doing? When I quit studying the influencers and started studying the banks, Goldman, JP Morgan, KKR, there's just an endless list of these guys. You start studying those guys, Elon, study Elon. Elon doesn't keep any cash. He thinks the whole thing's a joke, which he's probably right. So what does he do? He reinvests everything. He's not paying debt off. He's accumulating debt. But Apple has debt, Google has debt, Facebook has debt, and they have cash reserves that are the biggest cash reserves on planet Earth. They could pay cash for everything.

But they don't. Why do they get debt when they have all this cash?

Exactly. Why do they do that? Because if I take, man, you got a little whiteboard right here. God dang, okay? So if I take, Apple just did this, okay? I want to make a $90 billion purchase. I want to make a 90 and they're like, yeah, we got the cash for that. In fact, we have cash plus another 50%. We got plenty of cash to do this. Okay, and then one of their people says, okay, bro, you do that. That is not a tax deductible event. What we should do is we should go keep this and go borrow 90 billion. Really? At like 0.005%.

Mm-.

Like they're gonna pay a half of 1% for this debt. Maybe they pay 1%. Who cares? They're like, I don't care. It's a tax deduction anyway.

Interesting.

So now they have the best of both worlds. They have their cash and they have debt. Now back in, when I was growing up, this debt would cost 10, 12, 15, 18%.

It's so cheap now.

This debt, 'cause we print money. Money is not scarce like our parents told us. Like, well, I was growing up, I bet you I heard at least from my mother from the age of 10 to 15, if I didn't hear this 500 or 1000 times, I never heard it once. We don't own the electric company. Turn those lights out, boy. I still have that going on today. My dad, my mom told me my dad would, because he worked so hard, dude. He was so like, oh, I finally got it. I finally made it. Now I gotta protect it. He got stuck in the second piece keeping it. You know, it's an emotional keep. And so it's not a rational thing. 'Cause you're hoarding now, you know? Still today, man, it's tough for me to buy blue jeans if they're not on sale. I'm like, this is stupid, man. Like, why? I'm just gonna wait.

Right.

You know? So you know what I'm saying, but it's really stupid that I even worry about it.

Right.

And I'm not saying on the come up, I think you should worry about it.

Right.

But there needs to be where you can turn that switch off.

If you could give, you said there's a lot of misinformation and people just aren't educated on money in general when they're growing up, or there's just a lot of information out there.

Misinformation, I think the misinformation is more, it's not a financial illiteracy, it's a financial, it's almost like we've been hypnotized with the wrong set of rules.

So if you could only share, three pieces of information to your kids or the younger generation or anyone stuck on hoarding and keeping money, what would you say would be those three things that you would share to change the philosophy and mindset around the fear of money?

Well, I think number one is there's a bigger problem with hoarding in this country than there is with spenders. But what we see is, what we hear is all the spenders.

Who are getting into debt.

Yeah.

Oh my God, you know, he did this and he's overspending. But really, really you have more of a hoarding issue than you have a spender issue. Number one, I think people err more on saving and not knowing how to use money than they do on buying Richards and Lambo's, even though you see all that around LA. And I know that's, I know these people are, I walk into Vegas and I sit down at a table in Vegas and I know the three guys playing, They're playing 10 times more than I am. Like they're playing $2,000 a hand, I'm playing $25. I'm like, I know I'm in a better position to play what they're playing for, but I can't do it. So the advice I would give people is like, I would just assume that everything you know about money is incorrect.

Everything.

Every single thing you know.

Just assume it so you can get back to where?

So that you can actually have a white, you can have a clean, a clean board to operate from. Because if you go out right now and try to stack new information, financial literacy on top of, you know, a toxic foundation, it's all gonna get all... That's why when I tell people, don't go buy a house, everybody freaks out. They're like, that can't be right. That can't be right. Why? Because that's what you've been told to buy a house your whole life. 'Cause the banks want you to buy a house. Now, everybody just heard that's gonna say, I just saw you buy a house in Malibu.

Right.

I can do anything I want now. Here comes the arrogance. But I mean, I'm in a position now, like if I want to buy that house in Malibu, I can. But on the come up, buying a house is not what you should do. One, I would scrape off that you don't know anything. Two, I would invest everything you can in you. It's tax deductible. You never lose it. A person's personal appreciation will always be bigger than any other asset class.

I love that.

Bitcoin can't match it. Real estate can't match it. personal asset appreciation will always, it is infinite. You know, who knows? I could be the next male Oprah. Right. Or somebody watching could be the next Rock or whatever.

Right.

Like that. What is that appreciation value? It's straight up.

Yeah.

So the, the first thing people should invest money in, even use debt on, is their personal Improvement. If you told me you had to go borrow a thousand dollars to to go to one of your classes to become great and it had any potential at all? Like even a 1% chance of putting you on the road to greatness? I'd be like, dude, you go give Amex or Visa $1,000 right now. I don't even care what the rate is. Because the infinite return, infinite beats 18%.

Okay.

So number one, invest in yourself. Number two, I would invest in your business. Whatever your business is or your department, your division is, like the first 30 years of my career, I didn't have, I didn't own a company, but I did invest in my department. Even though I worked for a company, I had a secretary, I didn't have the company pay for my secretary. I paid for that. I wanted her to work for me. It was my mom, by the way. And so invest in yourself, you know, like invest in yourself, then invest in your business or your department, your skill set. If it's your company, then invest in your company, even down to zero. Like I wouldn't keep money around. I wouldn't save for a rainy day. I wouldn't have an emergency account. I did all that.

Why not?

Because you don't need it. What you need is you need hustle. You need other people's money. You need to go knock on another door, make another contact. You don't need reserves of money. So what you need is cash flow.

Okay, so how do we get cash flow?

So by making investments, that's the third. And other things, other things that don't require my skill set. So that would be the third piece of advice is start investing in real assets, that cash flow, number two, or B, that can appreciate, three that provide tax shelters. And if you look at those three criteria, Bitcoin doesn't cover it, stocks probably don't cover it, gambling doesn't.

Right.

That one gold doesn't, silver doesn't, real estate, real estate. NFTs don't, yeah. NFTs don't, 'cause they don't cash flow. That's why when you invested in NFTs and you're like, okay, they're cool, you're crossing your fingers hoping, but you don't see a check. With the real estate, I'm sending you.

A check every month.

You're like, okay, I just got another check, I just got another check, I just got, like, you don't have to be in mystery. But the most important thing is that people need to, like, you gotta, you gotta know that if you live in America, and you're having a money problem, it is not 'cause you're stupid. And it's not 'cause you're lazy.

What is it?

It's 'cause you have the wrong information.

The wrong information.

If you're losing at the table, and there's other people winning there, okay, you just have the wrong data. And I believe that Americans, particularly Americans, have the wrong data about money. That they're financially, they have medical misinformation, There is financial misinformation in the marketplace that is perpetuated by the banks and the institutions because every time you operate under their hypnotism, you benefit them, not your family.

So if someone's got between a thousand and ten thousand and they're trying to multiply it to a hundred thousand, what would be the steps they would take? How long do you think it would take them to go from a thousand or ten thousand to multiply. And would you say put that all in your own personal investment? Would you put it, invest in the business that you're in? Would you invest it in other things that cash flow appreciate and provide tax shelters? What would you do?

If you got a thousand dollars, I would like just keep, you know, keep investing yourself until you got another thousand.

Okay.

And, and then invest in yourself, you know, now you got two thousand invested. You go, go, go. You should start making money faster.

Mm-.

At some point you should start like every time you make an investment in yourself, if I put fuel in my car, it's supposed to take me further. Right.

Right.

So if I invest in myself, then, and look, you know, there's things I bought that I didn't get a return on right away. But I didn't quit investing in a course or a workshop or training or education because it didn't work. Or your health or-- I spent 17 years going to school. None of it was any good for me. But it did teach me, it did teach me how to go to school. -How to study. -How to study, how to go there, how to complete a course. Like I completed college. I'm not proud of that, by the way. -You're not proud you completed it? -No, no, because it was ridiculous. I should have dropped out. Like I knew it was a bad thing. -What'd you major in? -Major in accounting.

It's a good degree.

It's not like just some, you know, business degree. -Right. -But you should have dropped out of it. -I shouldn't 100% because I mean, I would still, I would still, I would, Well, I'd have a five-year jump on my career. But the problem is I was on drugs. So, you know, actual drugs.

If I wouldn't have been on drugs.

I would have quit college. 'Cause I would have had enough confidence in myself. When you're on drugs, you can't have confidence. 'Cause you know you're drugged. So everything is second-guess. Because my self-esteem was like through the basement. And so I'm like, I need to quit college. But everybody around me's, oh no, you gotta finish college, you gotta finish college.

I'm like, what do I know?

I'm a drug addict.

Mm-.

And if I drop out, I don't.

Have a degree, and then I gotta hire me. I didn't even worry about any of that. 'Cause, you know, I didn't worry about that.

I just didn't have the confidence to follow my intuition.

You can't when you're on drugs. When you're not yourself. So what do you do with a thousand bucks, right? You know, I think you just gotta keep investing in you until like, oh, now I'm making $3,000. Okay, boom, reinvest all that again. But what we do is we start taking it off the table, right?

We save it, we don't invest it.

So I think people just need to get on that cycle of like, okay, I'm gonna keep repeating this activity. I'm gonna reinvest the money in myself, go to the workshop or whatever. Monday I gotta be hustling again. Until, okay, now I got $4,000. Okay, now I got $5,000. Now the income's starting to pick up. Income has to pick up. The income should be an indication that whatever you're learning is helping you. That's interesting. Until one day you're like, okay, I have more money here than I can.

Actually invest in myself.

I can't, like, there's nothing I can go to to get rid of this money. You need to get rid of that money though.

All my free time is going to my workshops. I don't have more free time to invest in me. I'm developing skills, I'm working, I'm earning more. Now, what's the next step?

And now it would be, okay, I gotta spend money on marketing. I wouldn't go look for an investment right now. I'm gonna spend money on marketing now. Now I'm gonna spend money on marketing to get me more leads. And I would, you know, big mistake I made in my career was not spending more money on marketing.

'Cause you turned, what, 50 when you really started investing in...

I was 50, I was 51 when we started playing the social media game, and I was probably 56, 55 or 56 when we started spending money on marketing.

Wow.

Yeah.

51 when you started doing social media.

Yeah, yeah. And then, and I should have been spending money, I should have been spending money when I was 25 years old, when I was selling cars. I should have spent money, been spending money on ads, but I was scared, man.

So, so what made you not scared 25 years later? 26 years later at 51.

I started studying, hey, what do all these successful people have in common? You know, whether it was the mattress dealer, the car dealer, the furniture dealer, or Elon Musk, they spend money, man. You know, they spend money, they spend a lot of money, and they don't worry about money the way I was worried about it. They used money, you know, they used it. They didn't save it, they didn't hoard money. And the greatest companies on this planet today, the ones that have just like, some of these companies have lost money for 25 years. Look at Amazon. Yeah. Reinvest. 1.7 million employees. When I started, I remember I looked at Ernst & Young. I said, I have a buddy that worked at Ernst & Young. I said, How many employees you got? He's like, 240,000.

Wow.

And I'm worried about 10 people? What am I thinking? So when I quit studying individuals and started studying people, everything shifted for me. When I quit trying to be the, you know, when I quit worrying about what Bob was doing or Pete or whoever, and started saying, Hey man, what is this big company doing? Because that also relieved me of being competitive with this guy, Pete, and started saying, okay, I'm gonna go do what Coca-Cola does. It's when I bought the plane. Really?

Yeah.

How old were you when you bought the plane?

I was 50, maybe 55, the first one. I bought it because I studied what Coca-Cola was doing. They bought planes. I said, why are they buying planes? Oh, then I learned how they write them off, and then I learned how they trade them every three years. that's crazy. So notice every three years I'm trading a plane. I'm getting rid of it, replacing it with another one. But what are they using it for? They don't use it for pleasure. They're not using it for Instagram photos. They're using it to go and set up headquarters in other countries. Wow. You know, so so that's when I wrote if you're not first, you're last. Because when I started studying these companies, I'm like, Coca-Cola is everywhere. You can't go anyplace and not see Coca-Cola. and I was like this big. I was always thinking about what can I keep? And they were thinking about how many shells can we get on? How many eyeballs can we see? So that's when it all clicked for me. And that goes back to that thing about the financial misinformation, right? It's like, who am I studying? And that's when we started to open up the funds for, I went to New York City to go walk in Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan's. offices. I wanted to walk in and see what it was like. These are 100, multi-100 billion dollar companies.

Crazy.

You know? And I walked in, I was like, oh my God, man. It just all hit me in a second. I've been doing everything wrong.

What were they doing different?

They owned the building.

They weren't renting the building.

They owned the building. Well, they don't care if they rent. They could rent it, but they owned it. The elevators were bigger than the studio. One elevator. And 60 people got on that elevator and went to the 120th floor. And then there was six of these elevators, people going up and down. Everybody told me, Don't take people's money. Do not let investors invest when you keep the whole deal for yourself. The second I walked into Goldman Sachs.

Because all they're doing is getting investor money.

That's all they do. Okay? And the difference is, what I do is I could go to Goldman Sachs, I was there, they would give me money. And I'm like, I'm not gonna get money from them. I'm gonna do what they do.

From individuals.

Exactly. From my friends, from people that follow me, from people that support me, okay? Goldman Sachs will give money to anybody.

Right.

Okay, they don't know how to go to these people. They're not on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or TikTok. So I'm gonna create a fund where I can tell my audience, Hey, Louis, you can invest with me. I'm gonna kick Goldman out of the deal or JP or whoever, there's a bunch of these guys, you know? It's not that they're doing a bad thing or anything. I'm not saying they're the devil, but they're close, okay? Because they're not gonna call you up and say, how you doing, man? You know, without saying, hey, you got any money to invest? It's just not, you know, that's not what they do. Their job is to make money, period. So anyway, when I saw that, I'm like, okay, these people are, these are the richest institutions on the planet. They fund everything that happens. The company BlackRock, BlackRock's gonna be, BlackRock and Vanguard, these are multi, you know, probably gonna be worth $20 trillion each in the next handful of years. They'll own, they say they'll own 99% of all the assets on planet Earth, not just in America.

How are they able to do that?

Because they scale, right? Because they think big. So they're funding everything, everything that happens on this planet from media to pharmaceutical is gonna to be funded by those two companies. So it just, when you're studying your rich uncle or the neighbor down the street, the think is only so big. And then when I started studying these other companies, I was like, okay, this is who, if you want to create that kind of legacy wealth and really help a lot of people, because they are in a position to help or hurt a lot of people. That's the scale you got to think at.

Yeah.

But it took you really 25 years to get there, to start thinking that way, is that right? Because you weren't able to see yourself spending money for 25 years. You were just trying to earn more.

And more and more. Yeah, because I was just trying to, because I was, the grind, the grind was so, it was such a low level grind.

Let's say you had the right information in 25. Let's just say you had a rich uncle that did what these people did and you got to witness this. Do you think that you would have been able to get there faster? -Yeah, 1000 years. -Or do you feel like money only comes to you when you're ready for it? -No. -When you're ready to make it and when you're ready to take on the.

Risk or the responsibility. -Sabrina will never make the mistakes I made, okay? Because she won't get in the wrong car. I got in the wrong vehicle. I didn't know the vehicle I got in when I was 28 years old. I could actually make 100 grand a year doing this. My daughters will never get in that vehicle.

What would they do?

They'll be like, I'm not getting in a $100,000 ride. If they can't bring me, they're gonna be like, hey, if this doesn't have a billion dollar possibility, they're gonna pick that this is the wealthy, they put their kids, their kids see things differently if they're not ruined.

Right.

You know, if they're not completely ruined and scathed by having whatever they want. then they'll see opportunities different.

Yeah.

You know, and but when you see the possibility, then you're like, I'm not gonna get in that car, that car, that car. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get in a spaceship. So if I was 28 again today, I mean, I would know what industries to pick.

Top three industries to pick.

Hedge funds have to be one of them. Advertising and marketing's got to be a space to be in.

Mm-.

And probably, you know, something to do with health care. If I could scale health care, if I could scale the organic alternative medicines, you know, so those are three massive spaces. Maybe financial too. The financial world, you know, in the next 30 years, we're probably going to have a disruption of the dollar.

Right.

And the way money's, maybe we're a crypto currency, you know, environment in the future.

Yeah.

So any of that, any of that's going to happen, you know. But, but there, the re, the reason I would go there is like, like Jeff Bezos. When I, when I saw the first interview with Jeff when he was saying he was studying algorithms, I think he was, he was at one of the.

Big firms selling stocks before Amazon.

Yeah, before Amazon. And then he saw some, he saw something came across his desk where There was a spike in internet activity. Eyeballs going to the internet. That's when he said, I'm gonna go do Amazon. And he followed traffic. I didn't ever follow traffic. He followed scale. He followed scaling possibilities. And then what did he do? He followed this traffic, the possibility. Then he invested in the possibility. And then he went into debt on the possibility. And then he was willing to not get paid any money.

But what did I do?

I need money today. I gotta have money this week. I need to have a little more money next week. And if I get a little more money after that, I'm gonna save it all. And then I'm gonna go do that again. And I'm gonna feed the bank. And I'm gonna keep feeding the bank. I don't even know how much money the bank's made off of me for 20 years. Really? We don't know anybody that works harder than Grant Cardone. And as soon as he gets a bag, he brings it to us. What do they do? Hey, y'all wanna borrow this money? Now repeat that 300 million times.

Wow.

And that's the American people.

What about a family that's thinking, you know, I really feel comfortable having six months to a year of savings because I got kids, I got, you know, the rent, I got the all the bills. Yeah. What do you say to someone who's like, you, know what? I see where you're coming from, but maybe I don't feel that comfortable yet.

Well, then keep, you know, money, if you think money's gonna save you, you know, you're just, Again, they're stacking information on top of bad information. Okay? You know, the money that you have saved in the last six months has probably dropped 11%. So the money that you have, you got 100 grand, I gotta have six months of savings. I need, you know, 4,000, my bills are four or five thousand bucks a month. I gotta have 30 grand in the bank. Gotta have 30. But they really have 180. So first of all, I guarantee they have more than six months. and they don't even know it because they're living out of Terror. Right. It's not logic, right? You say it's logic. I need six months, but you got three times more than you need. Sure.

Number one.

Number two, you've never had an emergency that cost you 30 grand in your lifetime. Very few people ever had that emergency. Everybody hears about it. Oh, yeah, my guy got in the bud. This happened, blah, blah, blah. But if you had assets, if you'd have been investing in assets, you can always go use those assets for collateral to loan out. You can do cancer surgery.

You can get a loan out from the bank.

100%. Or if you just took the money that you earned and keep reinvesting in assets that pay you, not assets that you wish one day will pay you, but assets that pay you every month. If you keep investing in that asset class, one day your cash flow will be your emergency account. My emergency account last month paid me a million six. My cash flow. That's crazy. That's free cash flow.

That's crazy.

That's no work involved. That is not one second of one day. Okay? That was, and that happens every single month in my place. But that's been because I made a bunch of investments for the last, you know, 25 years.

Right.

End of every year, I dump all my cash out every year. I'm like, you need to get as close to zero as you can. and replace it with assets that in January, if I dump out in December, January, I want a payment from that. It doesn't have to be a big payment. Just needs to be a drip off that asset.

Something, yeah.

So I'm gonna go, I'm not gonna buy a cup 'cause the cup won't pay me. So in December, I had a bunch of money. Boom. I'm like, make a deal. You were in it, yes, a couple days ago. Yeah, yeah. Take- you- bought that house. Take that cash, that garbage that you have. Already had a surplus of money. so if I can't buy two of these, I'm not going to buy one of them. If I can't write off some portion of it, I'm not going to buy it. If I can't do it out of passive income, I'm not going to touch it. Interesting. So those are my, those are my criteria for making Investments.

Right.

And it needs to cash flow. So I took a bunch of this cash. It was sitting here just deteriorating, not providing me with safety, and took it and put it into this asset. And people like, are you stupid? You ridiculous. You paid that much money for that thing. Okay, we'll see. So I buy this thing, this thing will provide rental income. I think this year I'll make three million bucks on this deal. Wow.

In cash flow.

And how much do you have to.

Put down or do you buy the whole thing?

Well, I pay cash for this house. Gotcha. So, but the reason I did it is not because this is a great deal, but this is a terrible deal. Keeping the cash. Keeping the cash is garbage. This Malibu house is probably one of the worst investments I ever made. Okay. But I had a bunch of surplus cash. I had already bought, in December we bought almost 2,000 apartments. If I could have got another apartment deal, I'd have bought another apartment deal with the 40 million.

But I couldn't.

You couldn't find one. I couldn't find another deal, okay? I still had this money left over. End of the year, it's just the thing that I do. End of the year dump out, literally like flush the toilet on your savings. So every day I look at my savings accounts, okay? It's not because I'm worried about any more money anymore. I know for sure the money's going down in value. Everybody knows that this year. Your money is depreciating, right? It's dropping down in value. What you were told that is 100 grand is not 100 grand. The bank's not even telling you the truth. It's 100 less 11,000.

It's 11% right now.

It could be 34% less. Some people think it's going down 34%.

That's crazy.

But you're gonna still see 100 because this is invisible taxing, right? It's inflation.

Wow.

So I know that. I know it's not a hundred. So when you guys look at your chart, I got 180,000. You're lying to yourself. Because you're not doing all the math on money. This is why Mike Saylor went and took all that money he had and invested in Bitcoin. Bitcoin, yeah. Because he's done the research. So I would listen to him, and I'm not saying you guys should go buy Bitcoin, but I'm not buying Bitcoin at those levels. Okay, I'm buying assets that can provide you with more cash, with more income. Maybe I should be buying Bitcoin, I don't know. But anyway, so I dumped this out. I dumped this for... Now I've been shopping this piece of real estate for 19 months. I've been working this deal for 19 months. So I'm not being like, okay, I just gotta go buy something. I'm not gonna do that. But I'm trying to get rid of this cash to go into an asset that has the potential to go up in value over time. I dump out in January, okay? I do three webinars. That's why everybody wants to know, man, what's the rush to make more money? Because I'm broke, man.

And I got a new house.

Right.

You got bills to pay now.

You got expenses. So January 1st comes, I've done three webinars already to start filling this up again.

Mm-.

Right now, if I walked into January 1st with 40 million bucks sitting in.

A bank account, dude, you're not hungry.

What's the rush, bro? You're not hungry. Yeah, let's plan, let's do some planning this year. But what I do is I dump out. So every year for the last 15 years, every January, I end up with more assets. I go broke over here and I go up over here.

What are the top assets that will make money for you beyond real estate, do you think?

Let's see. I mean, that's my deal. You could buy mutual funds and you can buy, go feed Vanguard and go feed the Blackstone. you know, they own everything, dude.

Right.

You go make a bet on Disney, you know?

So you could buy stocks, you could buy funds.

Yeah, you could buy gold and silver. Gold is dead. Gold is. Gold is a terrible investment. Has been for 10 years. Anybody says it's a good investment, just look at the chart for 10 years. It's down this year. We got major inflation. It's supposedly the great inflation hedge. We have major worry about inflation and gold went down.

Yeah.

So you can go buy crypto. But you're gambling.

What would be your case for crypto? Let's say you had a billion dollars in Bitcoin and you had to make your case why this is an amazing investment. Obviously, that's not your thing.

Yeah, no, but I'm studying this whole thing. You see, Michael, I'm very interested in the space.

So.

I have probably $6 million in.

Bitcoin, in Bitcoin by itself.

Yeah, somebody gave me some.

I remember this was like four years ago, wasn't that three years ago?

I still have it.

I remember you said you got paid in Bitcoin. You got paid in Bitcoin.

Yeah, exactly.

And you said, I'll take your money in Bitcoin and whatever. Crypto and... Yeah, yeah, I'll take whatever.

And how much did you get when.

You originally got Bitcoin?

100 pieces. 100 pieces at 500 bucks? Yeah, yeah, so that's worth 40, you.

Know, whatever it is today.

I don't know. So what is that?

50 grand? Is that 50 grand you got? No, no, it's $5 million.

But what did you get when you got it? How much was it? It was $50, 100 pieces.

It was $500 and there was 100 pieces. So whatever, 50 grand. 50 grand.

So you had 50 grand for some.

Product you had or something or some... Yeah, yeah, whatever.

I was a speaking gig, actually. Speaking gig, yeah.

And now it's worth.

And then when it hit 30,000 again, I bought some more. Okay. Because I'm starting to like, okay, this thing could happen. Okay, 28 million pieces, you know, they're never gonna make more. It is not, to me, it is not an inflation hedge.

What is it?

It's just a place to store. It's an asset store. It's not a currency. I don't think it's a currency. 'Cause currency comes from the word current, it means it moves. And I don't see this moving. I see this as a storage. You know, I see this as something that could one day maybe replace gold as a standard. We're certainly gonna move closer to digital universe and money than we are gold standard. We're never going back to the gold standard.

Well, if you have a lot of it, you gotta be promoting it.

I'm 63 years old. never had any gold in my entire life. I've never had a gold block gold.

Unless you had maybe a chain or something.

I lost that. You know, I don't understand it. I think there's more people playing the Bitcoin game that day than there are people playing the gold game.

Right.

But anyway, so the case for Bitcoin is it's limited. You know, it's, it's, you know, hopefully they're not going to make any more. That's what they say. It is a ledger. I like that there's millions of computers backed up saying, hey, this is this is what it is, you know, and I don't completely understand it. Right.

But it's not paying you a dividend.

But that's what I don't like.

No cash flow.

Okay, now I'm in a position. I don't need more cash flow. You can't. I don't know how to spend a million six a month. Plus, plus I had the discipline to go make more money. It's not like I quit working.

So do you have a goal of how much cash flow you want?

No, I have a goal. I have a goal. well, the, the business, not the real estate.

Yes.

The business last year made, I mean, it made 8 million a month.

Wow.

Okay, so this is on your, the real estate, the educational side of things.

The events, the books, probably eight and a half. Okay.

Consulting, coaching, events, books, everything in there.

Gross income, 110 million bucks last year.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

No, from, dude, I remember when I couldn't make 100 grand in a year. Wow.

How does that feel?

So what? unbelievable, dude. I mean, today I woke up today, Jared hits me today. He's like 643, 000 today.

That's crazy.

Insane. Insane.

When was the last time you made a hundred grand in one year? That you're in the hundred to 100 to 200.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know. You know, but I remember when I. I remember when that was my goal, Louis. My goal was to make a hundred grand in a year, and I wanted ten thousand dollars. in passive income. I said, dude, if I can make 100 grand a year and $10,000 is passive income, I'm set. You know, so, so like this, this all is a bit of a dream to me. Like it's not like, you know, I never thought I would do this. I never even thought about these kind of numbers.

1.6 million a year.

In the passive income.

A month.

A month.

A month.

That's passive.

That's just money. That's not you working.

No, no, no, that's not a new real estate deal. That's not, that's not investors. Okay. Mike, so back to the goal. What's the goal? My goal, we paid out $3 million a month last year to investors. That's the thing I'm most proud of.

That's pretty cool.

That and what we do with kids is like the two things that I just trip on. I want to send out at least $30 million a month. We sent out 36 million last month, last year.

You want to do that every month?

I want to do that every month. And when I get to 30 million, I'm going to go to 300 million a month. Wow. I'm going to send out 300 million a month. I want 10 million investors and I want 10 million investors. I want to send more money out than I've ever made personally. A month. So I'm going to flip this whole thing. I'm going to go from the kid that was worried about the kid that, you know, grew up in a good household, became a drug addict, then he became a salesman. Everybody knows I'm just Guy always hit the link. Hit the link. You know, you guys are always freaking trashing on me because, you know, he's always selling something. I'm going to flip that whole thing to where I'm always sending people money. How does it feel for you to.

Know that there's money going out? Because I think it comes out like the 15th of every month.

-15Th of every month, bro. -I get an email.

-I see my statement. -When you see yours, I get mine. -Yeah. How does that feel knowing when you receive your 1.6 million, you're also how many thousand people that are invested in you are also getting a check that day. How does that feel?

I call them and say, Hey, how much do we send out? So, most important number I have, most important number, every day I get how much cash do I have? Second most important number is what we sold each day. Then the third one is how much we sending out this month.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, I look, how much I get, I look at last. Because if everybody else is winning, I know I'm winning.

You're getting big, yeah.

But the thing that, and the thing that makes me happiest is like, I know people can't lose with me.

Why is that?

Well, the real estate, it can't go away. You know, Bitcoin could go to 10,000 tomorrow. My real estate cannot go to 10,000. It just, the value of the real estate is the value of the real estate and it's supported by income, right? So this isn't a house, the Malibu house, the Malibu house could go down in value, but it's still gonna rent for 20 grand a night. It doesn't matter, dude. Like, you wanna be in that house, in that location, on that beach, you want to bring 12 other people to stay there, you're gonna pay 20 grand a night to be there. It doesn't matter whether the house is worth 40 million or 38 million or 32 million or whatever, you're gonna pay for the house. So as long as I got income, income allows you to, income and time allow you to keep something. It's paid for, I paid in cash, so there's no debt issue. I have my other house in Miami that's paid for, so I bought two houses last year. It's insane. It's crazy, man. You know, so and I'm the guy.

That says, don't buy a house.

He won't even take his own advice.

Oh, I am taking my advice. But at this level, you can buy.

What you want because you got the cash flow to come in. Like, I am taking all my advice. I'm not ignoring my own advice, you know? So, I'm not violating any of my rules. If you can't buy two of them, don't even think about it. Number two, if you can't pay for it in cash, don't think about it. It doesn't mean you've got to pay for it in cash. It just means you need to be in that position. If you want a nice watch, build about two of them. The watch is 40 grand. You've got to have 80 grand. It needs to be in cash and it should be from passive income cash, not earned income.

Why is that mindset?

You need to be able to buy two of them. If you can buy two of them, dude, you're probably cool. So then you don't ever-- like, when do you spend-- somebody asked me the question once, Hey, man, when's it all.

Right to spend a rapper?

Hey, man, when's it all right to be stupid? But when you got stupid money, you can be stupid.

Yeah.

What is stupid money?

Well, stupid money ain't earned income. Mm-.

Even if you made 10 million dollars.

I don't care how much you made. If you made 10 and paid five to the IRS and you got five left, you don't spend that. I never spend that money, ever. So, so this is- I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever spend earned income. Really? Never. So my earned income, okay, if I traded time for it, my earned, I never spend a penny of it. Okay? Okay, now what I do is I invest all of the earned, whatever's left over after the IRS, so the IRS is gonna bang me right here. I invest all of that, 100% of this is invested, I save none of it. I invest this in a real asset that will pay me cash. mm-. And it's going to give me a drip, right? It's going to give me a little drip of cash. So maybe this is a million dollars. So this pays me, let's say it pays me a hundred grand a year. I can spend this, but I can't.

Spend, I can't spend that now because it's not spendable.

This is illiquid. The asset you can't spend. Can't spend it, can't touch it, can't have it stolen from you, taken from you, you know, but it's kind of hard to make it go away. Sure.

Right.

I do need to fund it, need to, you know, this is what the Bitcoin people, Mike Saylor is going to say, yeah, but you got property taxes, you got maintenance. Oh, yeah, I know, bro. I also got income. Cash flow. I don't have any yet. I got cash flow, right? So I can keep it, so I get a drip. Now, the drip is how I live. Like if I want to buy a $100,000 watch, good. Okay, I can buy 100 as long as I got 200 grand. So, and it's all right to do stupid stuff, but here, when your money is having little babies, not when you're up there on your legs and busting your knees up, doing your psalm, because one day he's 29 right now, Nobody like I know you think you're gonna.

Last forever Look at a lot of.

These guys nobody lasts forever so what I want to do is I want to position him I said look in the next 10 years if you retire when you're 39 or 49 I want you to go from being youg know tearing up your space making big money in your space and the moment you transition from rapper mm- and become nobody, we're gonna click a switch and you're gonna be a real estate mogul.

Okay?

So my goal for him is, I said, look, what do you make? And I picked the number. He's like, dude, you just told me what I made last year without knowing what I made. And I hit the number almost exactly. Figured out how many days he did, figured out what he was getting paid.

Endorsement deals, everything else.

I said, look, I said, when you're 49 years old, bro, you could be.

Worth 200 million bucks.

Right over here.

If you put this much in every year.

If you just do what I tell you to do. You go work a gig, they pay you 130,000, you take 60 grand parking. Wednesday night, you do another deal. He's like, what am I gonna live on? Bro, you're gonna live on deals. So nobody's gonna know what happened to you. They're gonna be like, hey man, the savage ain't showing off anymore, man.

So I said, yeah, but bro, you're.

Gonna go from- you-'re gonna show off in a bigger way, right? Bro, you're gonna show up as a real estate tycoon. You're gonna be, one day you're gonna show up, it's gonna be 2042. and you're going to have hundreds of millions of dollars of properties that are paying you every month.

You don't have to go work for that.

You're going to step from this way. A-Rod talked about this to me at the Growth Conference. He's like, I knew my earning capacity was going to go to zero with the Yankees. At some point. At some point. Everybody's earning capacity is depreciating. So at the beginning it goes up, like yours is still going up, right? You're still going to, at some point it'll hit the top. You'll lose interest, maybe not want to do it anymore, whatever, and then it's going to start slowly going down until you're just not a thing anymore and some younger Lewis house is going to come up and replace you or a bunch or technology or whatever, and your earning capacity is going to go down while it's going down on the way up, you should be planning for that going down and collecting assets over here. Wow. So that's why at the end of each year, like if people could do this, at the end of each year, start a new year with more assets and no cash and do that every year. Year, two years, five years, 10 years, 12 years. Like if I had advice for somebody, I'd be like, man, don't just worry about this year. Start collecting a little bit of assets this year, another one next year. You don't have to own it all. Like the way you're doing it with me. Find somebody that you trust, somebody that's invested, man, and just keep getting rid of cash.

Right.

Because you know, every time I get rid of this money, see, every time I get rid of this, let's say it's, let's say it's 100 grand. Every time I get rid of 100 grand, 100 grand buys me $400,000 worth of real estate, right?

Because you only have to put 20% down.

Yeah, because I'm using leverage, so I'm taking the 100 that's going down in value. Maybe 15 or 20% a year.

You're putting into 400,000 of real estate.

I'm going up.

And this is going up in value.

Well, this is good for me because inflation, if you own real estate, you want inflation.

Right.

I want the materials to cost more.

I want the cost of glass to go up. I want, I benefit from this. I want rent to go up. Yes. So, like, not everybody, I don't want inflation if you have cash. If you have cash, you definitely don't want inflation. Interesting. Okay. Because it's going down in value, even though the bank might pay you more. Now, what we got right now, what's going on right now is a really freaking weird deal because the banks aren't paying anymore. and it's going down in value. So the value of the dollar is going down and they're not paying you anything at the bank. So you're just getting double whammy with no chance.

Why is it important for people to be investing in real estate now? Like if you could do it now and should they do it on their own in terms of like, okay, I'm gonna buy my own apartment building or my own house and do kind of the Airbnb thing.

What about that strategy? It's good. It's good. It's a good. But you just went from having a.

Job to a second job. 'Cause now you're managing the property.

You're managing it, you're handling problems, you're collecting rents. That's another job. Actually, that's probably not going to be even included as passive income. Interesting. So there's a lot of people in multi-level marketing that say that they have passive income.

I'm like, that's not passive income.

That's residual income, not passive income. What's the difference between passive and residual income? Passive income is I make an investment and somebody sends me a check. Residual income, and it could be residual. It could be repeating, recurring, right?

Right.

If I go collect the rent, paint the place, put in the tenant, that's not passive. That's active income. I had to rent it, I had to collect it. You're trading time for money.

You had to market it, you had to do all the stuff.

What you get from me is passive. You don't decide what color the paint on the building is.

No.

You haven't even been to the building.

No.

I can't believe it's the 15th again. Right. that's passive income, right? Dividend income is passive income. You invest in Apple computer and they send you a check.

But if you have to work for it, it's not passive.

No. So the CEO of Coca-Cola made 50 million bucks last year. A lot of money, right? Okay, that's earned income. Government's gonna take half of it. Warren Buffett invested in Coca-Cola. He was paid 508 million, come on, last year. That's passive income.

That's a dividend?

Yes.

And he doesn't have to pay taxes on it.

Now you know how many people on the internet want to be the boss?

A lot.

Dude, the boss don't make any money. The investor does. Don't be the boss. Don't be the CEO. There's so much confusion in the marketplace. Be the investor. Just invest. And what does Warren do? Warren is how I got in real estate. I started buying real estate because I studied the old man.

What are you?

The old man, when I would read, well, the old man's only invested in stocks, right? I'm like, I'm not going to do stocks because I don't like them. But what I wanted to learn from Warren Buffett, what was he doing? What was the consistent patterns of what he invested in? All companies that were had been around a long time, he did not buy the cheapest company. He never looked for what my uncle looked for. He didn't buy low and sell high.

What was he doing?

He bought fair value in a fair price. He bought the best quality at a fair price. He didn't look for the lowest price. He wasn't looking for the day a stock went down to $1. He never did. He's never done that. He invests in companies that all cash flow leaders in their space. Coca-Cola, Seacan, candies, Apple Computer. He didn't buy Apple Computer. For years until he understood that Apple Computer was a cash flow company because of iTunes.

Wow.

That it wasn't a computer company. It was a cash flow generating machine. When I read that, I'm like, dang dude, everything he buys is really real estate. You see, so I'm like, okay, I can't get the, I cannot buy a big enough position. I'm not rich enough to get a big position of Coca-Cola. I don't get on the inside. I'm a little guy, right? So I'm never gonna get access to Wall Street. Goldman Sachs ain't gonna call me and say, Hey, we got this deal going, man. It's gonna be the next Coca-Cola, right? I'm never gonna get that call. So what can I buy? This like Warren. Oh, real estate, man. I can buy the 26 units in San Diego because I know the neighborhood. I grew up there and I spent some time there. So I know that. So I can buy that.

I can go to the bank.

I can get a good loan on it and it cash flow. and that's how I started buying real estate because Warren, he bought for the long term. He bought great locations or great properties.

Fair price.

He's never managed anything.

He's not a CEO.

He's not a manager. He's not a CEO. He never gets rid of the employees that are there. And I was like, man, what are you doing, dude? He's not the salesman, but he is a promoter. So when I started watching his moves, He's on TV all the time and he takes big positions, giant positions, not little ones. All that changed everything for me. I quit buying this and a little bit here and a little bit there. It's called diversification. I quit doing that when I watched Warren. Warren is not diversified. I think four investments gave him 70% of all his returns last year.

Wow. Yeah.

And if he wasn't so rich, he'd probably only own three or four stocks. But he's got it. He's so, there's so much money now. Elon's another guy, never diversified. PayPal was his only investment. When he sold PayPal, he only has three investments today. And no homes. And no cash.

Really?

No cash.

Oh, he doesn't own real estate or he doesn't own his home.

He doesn't own his homes. he's all in, man.

Yeah.

But that's not the advice our parents gave us or our school teachers.

Right.

Where's housing going to be in the next eight to ten years?

Do you think it's gonna be what? It's gonna have people in them.

Right.

And it's gonna be more expensive. And I think people are going to be more renters than they're going to be owners.

Why is that?

Because it can be too expensive to own. Too expensive. So wealthy people are buying all the housing stock in America. The other thing that since the last time I was here, we've had investors 40% of all the homes in America now are owned by investors, the single family homes. And that's going up.

Wow.

So in 2019, 44% of all the single family housing in America was owned by an investor, a guy like me.

Wow.

That bought it to rent it out, not to live in it. That's three years ago. COVID changed everything. So now you have more people buying real estate to Airbnb it, Great, great idea, but you're working, okay? Two, you're dependent upon one door. So I got to collect the rent. So like you're invested, how many funds are you investing with me?

Three or four.

Yeah, so you have hundreds of units that pay you. Not a few.

Right, I might be in five now actually.

Yeah, yeah.

Last year.

Yeah.

Calling me up the last month saying, get rid of your money.

Get rid of it.

What happens when 90% of the housing market is owned by investors and not by people that own it themselves to live in it?

People are going to look for, I mean, you know, it's happening right now. It's just unfortunate.

Is the price is going to go through the roof? Is it going to be?

Well, I don't know that the single family, will it go through the roof? I mean, it's, you know, I mean, it's already going through the roof. Yeah. You know, it's crazy. What's going on? but if you go to Singapore, it's not crazy, right? The rents, we went to Singapore in 2019. We came back, me and Elena said, we need to buy everything in sight. In America. Oh, in America.

Yeah.

We went to Sydney, Australia. I'm like, Elena, we just need to buy. We. Because everywhere we go, we shop real estate. Why is that? Because America's on sale. Because it's so expensive. So you guys think it's expensive here. Okay, so, like, California right now, California is making Arizona go through the roof. Because people are leaving the state of California, they're migrating out because of your tax policies.

In Texas and yeah.

Or they're going to Texas, or they're going to Montana, or they're going to Utah, okay? California, your governor Newsom this year was nominated as the number one real estate agent for the state of Florida. Because that's what he's doing. The tax policy drove me out of the state nine years ago. We have 800 employees in Miami. Between Miami and the real estate, there's 800 employees. None of them live in California.

Wow.

If they were to drop taxes here rather than raise them, I'd have 800 employees in LA. All my cars would be here. 800 employees in their cars. 800 employees would be eating in restaurants here. But what do we do? They raise the taxes. We go over there. We take all the tax savings, reinvest in the business. The business gets bigger and better. and I'm not gonna give our governor, DeSantis, credit for it because I got there before he was there. So I'm just gonna give credit to the insanity of California. So what's happening now is Arizona prices are going up because California people are going over there. Texas prices, yeah. So the guy in California sells his house for a million six, walks into Arizona and says, this is a steal at 800. Last time I traded it was 400. He thinks the steal is because it's half price to what he left. and that's what people do. They migrate, start moving around. That migration is happening. New York City's migrating to Florida, California's migrating east. But the problem is, with people leaving California, you would think prices would fall. They're still going up. But they're not. They're not because wealthy people are walking in saying, I got all this cash. Cash is worth nothing. I'll buy a second home. This is emotional. This is not logical, by the way, what's happening. It's not emotional. It's an emotional decision to say, I'm gonna get rid of my cash and I'm just gonna go buy another house.

I got a question about, every time I've had you on, I think the last three or four times, I've asked you about your goals with your assets. I think one time you came on, I think you were at like 90 million or something. I remember it was like 290 million or 90 million in real estate asset holdings.

I think we were buying a deal. I was buying a deal in Houston for 90 million. $900 million bucks.

Yeah.

But you didn't have more than $400 million, I think. I can't remember.

It was under that. At the time. You mean that one interview where you challenged me? Yes.

Yeah.

So at that time, I think we had... This was at two places. Maybe $400 million worth of assets.

Right.

And now today, four billion.

Four billion.

Yeah.

And I remember challenging you being like... You did, dude. Being like, why not go to like $900 million?

You said, why not 10x that? Yeah, yeah. And I said, I got a deal. I'm doing a deal. It's 90 million bucks. It's scary.

I was scared.

I'm always scared in all these deals.

Yeah.

And because you're doing it for the first time, you know, it's like the roller coaster, right?

You're like, oh my God, this is gonna be, you know, am I doing the right thing?

So you're at 4 billion now.

What's the goal? The goal, well, we're gonna 10x that.

To 40 billion. 40 billion, yep. By when? I don't have a date on it, but I think I can do that. I think I could do that. you know, I think I can do that in, you know, five years. Five years. Maybe, maybe, maybe longer. Maybe it takes seven years. Maybe it takes 10 years. It's a worthy goal either way. Yeah, 40 billion. Because a lot of, if I do this the way I'm doing it now, a lot of people are going to get help because of it. So that, that would be like, that would be a really fulfilling accomplishment in my life. If I could, right. If I could have ordinary, everyday families like I grew up in, like my mom, like my mom would be proud of what I'm doing. She would be negative first. Nobody ever called her and said, hey, Consuela, put your money in this. And this investment is going to take care of you. You're going to get a check every month. My mom never, she didn't get a break. And so today, I think that there's going to be families. The goal is that there's going to be thousands, tens of thousands of families. They'll become reliant and know that, hey, Grant Cardone's going to send me money this Mm-. And then I'm gonna flip this entire picture who I'm gonna evolve again to not taking money from people, not selling things, which I have no problem with. Everything I've sold, I feel great about. Except maybe that one car I sold to my uncle, my cousin Tony. But because I was a little excessive. But You know, that's gonna be a total evolution of me as a person.

Just paying people.

Dude, sending people money every month. I mean, like, it is the greatest freaking hack in the world. Completely discovered by mistake. The first time I took any money from anybody, we opened a deal up. That fund was $6 million. And Ryan Sheckler and Atlanta taught me into doing stupid guys. We don't need it. I had the money. I already bought the deal.

What year was this?

Four years ago. Really?

2018.

Yeah.

Because you were doing stuff on your own before.

I still buy it with my money today.

So 2018, we closed the deal.

It was a deal in St. Lucie. And I bought it from a group called Waypoint. It took $6 million in down payments. I'd already signed on the loan. And Elena, and do it on this deal, Grant. It's a small deal. Let's just see what happens. stupid. We don't need to do this. I tell my friend, I tell people on Instagram, Hey guys, I just opened this deal, blah, blah, blah. Wham, money starts coming in. I said, that's a crazy. I mean, I know how to compare a response because of the webinars and the events and the tickets and the books, right? And people are like 10,000 or I think at that time it was 100 grand minimum, 100 grand a time, bang, bang, bang. And then this one guy sends in 400 grand. And I'm like, who's he? I said, I don't know that person. And then they pulled him up, oh, he owns a car dealership up in Michigan. I'm like, I know that guy. I know that guy. I've been calling on that guy for 20 years. Called him up on the phone. I said, Hey man, why'd you do this? He's like, I've never bought anything from you. Nothing. Not a book, not a program, not a workshop. I said, why'd you do this? He's like, Because I admire you as a businessman. Okay, but I've seen your whole career. I've watched you 17 years. I've watched what you built. Okay? Wired us 400 grand.

That's crazy.

Okay, 60 days later, I sent him one check. It was in March, sent him another check in April on the, on, on, in May. He calls them, says, All right, bro, I'm ready for all your stuff.

Wow.

He bought everything we have. I was like, oh my God, this is the great hack. I'm gonna turn everybody into an investor. Then they become customers.

Right.

'Cause they want me to do well. Now we're partners, man. We're partners. You want me to win.

Absolutely.

Okay, so it was like, oh my God, man, having investors isn't a bad thing if it's the right investors. Now we've already had a problem with a couple of investors that turned into little wankers. People got in trouble in COVID. I'm like, Good, guys, you need some help. Send them their money back. So if I can, if I'm in a position to do that, I want to do this because this is a really long play for me.

Yeah.

And I mean long. I don't mean my lifetime.

This is Generations.

This is, this is your, this is Sabrina and Scarlett beyond them.

Wow.

This could be the year 2200.

Mm.

You know, this, this is a company that could last forever.

That's exciting.

Yeah.

So, because, you know, that would be, there's a lot of moms out there like my mom was. A lot of my sister, my sister, my two sisters that don't have income, you know, that Goldman Sachs is never gonna call them and say, hey Diane, you wanna invest in this deal? It's gonna be good for you. We don't use middlemen, we don't use banks. So maybe I can convert some of your audience that has ragged on you for having me here.

I know.

Because nobody is more that's true. And I have been dude. Like, like, and that's the thing, like you asked me, what would I want to get out of this show more than anything? You know, I know I deliver terribly. Like, I'm just, you know, I'm a grinder. I've been grinding. I've been trying to come up from nothing so long. And, and then it worked. My aggressiveness worked one day. And then I doubled down on being aggressive. Then one day I looked up and the only thing I knew was how to be aggressive. And so now I'm trying to unwind, you know, attacking all the time. Like, I have attack. The attack gene was fully developed in me.

Yeah.

And I'm not proud of that, right? Like, that's my go-to. My go-to. I remember a lady, she wanted, she tried to put me on drugs when I was 20. I was 31 years old, 32 years old dating this girl named Michelle. And she's like, Look, man, your first response is just aggression. I'm like, yeah? She's a psychologist, you know?

I said, yeah.

And it doesn't work with her. You know? I'm like, okay. This is what got me out of this trap. So I'm 33, maybe 33 years old. So I'm eight years out of treatment. And I'm just starting to get my feet.

Eight years.

I'm starting to make a little money. I've got a little company now. starting to do well for the first time. Me and this girl have this thing, but we were two different people. And the psychologist's like, Look, you know, I'm gonna recommend a drug. This is 12 minutes into the interview. I'm gonna recommend, I think it was a Prozac or something. And then if that one doesn't work, then I'm gonna introduce you to a psychiatrist. He's gonna give you this one drug, and then if that doesn't work, we'll add one. And if that one doesn't work, we'll add one. Sometimes a little bit of an experiment.

That's crazy.

And I'm like, yeah, dude, what are you trying to do? She's like, I'm trying to take some of your aggression. I want you to just add a second. And then she moves to the girl and says, and now you. I said, no, no, no. Give me this, subscribe whatever you want to me. Okay? She's not going on anything. Because they wanted to get her up a little bit, make her more aggressive. And she and up, they prescribed it to me. One interview, I was there less than 45 minutes. Wow. Okay, I ate one of them. I forget what it was. It was one of these.

Something to relax you a little more.

Yeah, yeah, just it was gonna add a second. It was lithium. It was lithium, dude. I took it, I took half a tab, and I could feel metal moving through my system. And so somebody would ask me something, and I'd, you know, but I couldn't. It was like, you know, you had to move through this little metal, almost this little aluminum, like, and threw the prescription away. Got rid of her, went back to being aggressive. Now I'm 35 years old, bro. I would continue to groove in aggressive for the next 16 years to make millions of dollars to fight in an industry that was brutal, cold calling people. Can you imagine cold calling people every day?

I could, but I don't want to.

Nobody wants to.

It's not fun.

And I built this shell, right?

Because you get so many rejections, so many no's, so many people waste in your time.

Yeah. And, and I got to a point where I'm like, okay, the notes and the rejection don't even bother me anymore. Now, now you become like a machine, man. And I'm just like, like, and everything's competition. Everything. Everybody's a threat in my environment. Everybody. Every company, every customer, everything is. And that's what built me.

Right?

And that, and, and then I figured out how to use aggression to get over it. And then, then I'm 51 years old. I'm like, man, I gotta learn.

I gotta figure out another way to do this thing. 'Cause is that sustainable for the rest of your life?

No. No.

So I started doing social media, social media comes, I'm like, okay, don't do the aggressive thing. Have empathy. When I met you, I'm like, I need to study Lewis, right? But I don't know how to make that transition any more than somebody that knows empathy knows how to become aggressive. You know?

Yeah.

And so I've just been trying to.

Figure it out, man.

And what do you think?

It'll take for you to step into who you really want to be moving forward.

I just gotta, you know, just every day just, you know, practice a little more about like in deals though. I need to be that in deals. Sometimes I just need to walk away from the deal and let Ryan handle it.

So.

With some grace or something.

Yeah, we did a deal. We bought two deals off market in December. If I was on those deals, I would have completely scorched the entire environment.

Blown it out.

I would have blown everything up.

What'S the thing you think you'll be the most proud of if you can create by the end of the year or become this year, the end of this year.

This year.

This year. What could I create this year or.

Do or be that you'll make you the most proud of?

I don't know, man. Like, you know, the kids. I mean, I love my kids. I love my wife. I want. I need to. I need to be a better husband. At some point, I can't, you know, doing these deals like that. That's great. I gotta do deals, though. to reach my goal with the investors. Be a better guy, man. Just be a good guy and be, the thing I'm proud of is I get to be Grant all the time. I'm actually getting to the point where I'm like, hey man, I finally got to be what I finally became what I wanted to be.

What was that?

Me.

That I don't have to apologize anymore and that I quit screwing up and I quit having to call people and say, hey man, I said, I went too far, you know, if I could just pull some of that back without that drug that that psychiatrist was trying to use, you know, that if I'm less dependent upon aggression, you know, and I could, I could kind of manifest more, you know, like you, you talk about. Let it flow more. Let it flow, dude.

Let it flow, you know, but, but.

If I could get that perfect balance of aggression and flow, that's a sweet spot.

Yeah, it's sweet, dude.

It's hard to find that thing.

That's a sweet spot.

You know, to be that, I don't want to be the little stream that drips, you know? I want to be like, but I don't want to damage anybody. I don't want to hurt anybody, you know? I don't want to be in competition anymore. But I also don't want to lose the edge. You know?

It's a dance.

Dude, it's a dance.

It's a dance, man.

You know?

Like your girl said to me the other night, she said something before she left. She's like, I really get who you are. you know, and that hits me when people say that to me. Most people don't get who I am.

That's beautiful.

You know, and she said, I really get who you are. And a lot of people don't. And sometimes it hurts, right? 'Cause I know who I really am. But I also know the things I'm trying to accomplish for me. Like Ryan gets who I am. Ryan never takes me on. Man, you're the best, Quinn. You're the best. He strokes me, right? Right, Drew. and, and, and, you know, my wife, I can see my wife. She gets, she gets tired of the, the, the pounding, you know? But, hey, man, I just, you know, I'm a right-handed hitter, you know, or I got, I got a certain ball that I throw, a certain shot I make. Yeah, it's my go-to you know, and when, when I get threatened, I'm gonna go to that. And now, if I could develop some other set of skills, you know, that.

Would be, that would be a cool thing.

What would it take for you to develop that skill? you know, I just. I don't know that I need to develop it. I probably just need to get rid of something, you know, probably something that has to happen spiritually more than.

Yeah.

You know, some of this stuff you got to get rid of.

Yeah.

You don't have to add on to it.

You gotta Purge it. It's funny because I've. I've known you for, I think, 12, 13 years, you know, probably more in the last five years, even closer.

Yeah.

Friends. And every time I have you on, I do get. the old, you know, comments of unsubscribe. And I can't believe you support this guy who said this five years ago or does this or whatever.

Yeah.

And I always tell people one-on-one like, I get Grant. Like, when I'm around you.

Yeah.

And we're hanging at the house or hanging out of, you know, restaurant or whatever. I get to connect with you like this and I really get to see you.

Yeah.

And I think I told Martha, my girl, when we were going to meet you, I was like, listen, Grant's got a certain, you know, it's like, oh my god. Grant's got a certain, like, watch some of his content because some people, he.

Rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Yeah, yeah, but a lot of people.

You were warning her, huh? But I come with a warning. But I, 'cause she wants to really invest, right? She's like, she wants to invest, she's telling me today, she's like, when are you gonna give me the information to invest? Cardone Capital. And I said, yeah, I'll connect you with Ryan, we'll make it happen, whatever. And I said before she met you, I was like, you know, watch some of his videos.

Yeah, yeah.

First on Instagram.

Yeah.

To know what you're gonna get into and why people have an opinion. She started watching and she was like, I really like this guy. I really like his approach. It makes sense what he's saying here. I can see past all the money flashy stuff talk and see like, yeah, this makes sense. The message makes sense. And whenever I'm around you, I feel like I get to see the real you beyond what's out there in the world. So I really acknowledge you, man, 'cause in 13 years, you've grown exponentially spiritually.

Yeah, I was saying that.

You're still driven more than ever. But you're driven to serve more than ever. 13 years ago was about competition, winning, growth, making more money, building, selling, and that. But in the last five years, I've seen your transition to service, service, service, which I think is really inspiring. It's the life that I want to live by.

Yeah, I know.

My whole thing is impacting lives every day, and I probably should think more of how do I earn more? Not just give it all away for free and help people only, but how can I build a business so I can impact the lives of my team members and more people financially?

Right.

But it's really cool to see you transition more into the spiritual.

Yeah, and I've always been a very spiritual person. Service based, I mean. I know, and me and my twin brother, both, we're, I'd always look at him, 'cause when you have an identical twin, you look at him and you're like, you see yourself.

Wow.

And he was always like spiritually very driven, very highly interested in the spiritual, curious beyond. And I've always been super curious.

Yeah.

Even when I was a little kid in church, I was curious. I'm like, okay, not everything's adding up here, but there's something here. And so I've always been like number one, like if I could accomplish one thing is Like it's always been the curiosity of the spiritual. Add to that the financial thing. It's like, I don't understand why somebody would be spiritually connected and not control the material.

And it's always bankrupt.

Yeah, exactly. I've never understood that.

Interesting.

You know, I've never understood why somebody wouldn't... The spiritual to me is senior to the material. So if you're a spiritually senior, senior, then you would have control of the material.

Interesting.

Maybe to a point to where you're like, I don't even care about it anymore.

Yeah.

Like Elon is. Like Elon, Elon seems extremely elevated beyond, like all this money thing's a joke. The whole thing's a joke. The shareholders are a joke. The SEC is a joke. Like it's a spiritual, it's a God joke, you know? It's like, You know, this house in Malibu, somebody was telling me, you, need to treat the wood. You need to treat the wood to protect it against the ocean. I'm like, bro, I put a sealant on this wood, and Mother Nature says, Ha ha. It's a joke. There's nothing that can be, that can prevent the ocean, you know?

Right.

Like money's a joke to God. But I gotta live on a planet with gravity. and Whole Foods, the prices are going up, you know, and I'd rather pay the investors every month and keep everybody happy and wanting to do it again.

Yeah.

And I'd like to win.

Absolutely. Cardonecapital.com. people can learn more if they want to invest. You've got big deals coming up all year, you know, for many years to come. I've been investing for, I don't know, four years now, and it's been nice to get a check every month. So thanks for the Thanks for the checks every month. And hopefully they keep getting bigger. You know, the bigger they get, there's the thing with me, 'cause I never bought any real estate before. I never invested in my own home or anything like that.

You've been renting.

Yeah.

I think you have a check before we came over here. Your portfolio value should be six to $7 million right now.

Wow.

Yeah.

But you didn't spend six million.

No, but a fraction of that.

Yeah, exactly.

And the thing for me, I was always, I wanna say afraid, unsure. I was uncertain. Okay, if I invest money in real estate, what's going to happen? You know, I get money back. Is it going to happen? I started getting checks back and I was like, okay, and the more I see the consistency of it, the more I'm like, let me put more in. And I wish I put more in, you know, four or five years ago. So that's what's been cool. Cardonecapital.com, people can learn more there.

If they want to get involved or they just want to learn more, they can call your team. They can check out stuff. There's people there.

There's a big, a lot of employees.

A lot of people there support the investments.

If you want to follow more about Grant, go to just GrantCardone.com, DesiringMoreEmpathy.com, searching empathy. Yes, exactly. But your social media is great. You've got great wisdom, great content, inspiring, funny, powerful, useful information. So GrantCardone.com, everywhere, YouTube is great content as well. Cardone Capital, where else can we go to support you? You got great books, 10X.

I just, you know, I want everybody to be great and, you know, I want everybody to do well. Like, I love watching people do well. We were in Golden Beach one night for Halloween. My kids, I was driving around trick-or-treating, man, 80, 10-year-olds bombed my truck.

Wow.

Chanting my name.

It was like, that's crazy.

It was the most, exciting thing that's ever happened to me in my whole life. Really? Yeah.

Why was that the most exciting thing?

Because these were 10 year old kids, man. Like, I didn't know they even knew me.

Wow.

And they followed, they knew me from TikTok. Thank you, man, teaching me about money, man. I shared this with my parents. They knew my name, man. Like, it was like, oh, my God. My kids were like, my kids wanted to go home. One of them didn't feel good. They wanted to go home. And then all the kids bombed the truck and the kids now, my kids are celebrities. you know, and one kid left the nanny's truck and said, no, I want to hang with you, Papa. Because they could feel this whole thing happen, right? And this is in the, we didn't expect that to happen. You know, I didn't know those kids knew me. Now the parents are like, who's that? So it was like this phenomenal, like, for all the hate and the negativity and the criticisms I get, you know, the whole thing that happened in COVID the bankruptcy video and I had friends, man. Friends, people that I have had on my stages trashing me. Really? When they thought I was going bankrupt. Really?

What happened?

Well, I did the bankruptcy video. So I did this little video, like some kids said, I hope you go bankrupt, man, because COVID was like full bloom March 2020. I hope you go bankrupt. And I'm like, yo, yeah, that's gonna happen. Tongue in cheek, right? I went to my aggressive. Now I'm gonna take this kid on, right? I'm losing everything, bro. I'm losing the jets, the blah, blah, blah. So I did this whole video. You said that you're losing it. Yeah, I'm losing everything. That's a joke. Well, I was doing undercover billionaire. Oh, right, right, right, right. Well, I couldn't tell people that I went broke. Sure. 'Cause the show got canceled. Gotcha. It got stopped because of COVID So I'm like, yeah, I went broke. I'm losing everything. I don't tell them I'm this Louis Curtis guy. Right, right, right. So it's a little tongue in cheek. And then everybody started like, Grant Cardone just said he's going bankrupt and people.

Started picking it up.

And friends of mine, oh yeah, I always knew he was gonna bust out. He took on too much debt. No way. People, you know, Jay-Z talks in one of his songs about, you know, when all the money goes away, the pigeons take flight. I think it's in, your audience will know what song we want. Maybe it's Otis. And all the pigeons take flight, you know, meaning your friends will fly off.

The ones are fake friends.

The fake friends, right? The takers. And sure enough, bro, like people that said, Boy, my friends the week before started chattering. And so it just, you know, It just goes to show you like who your real friends are, who the support is. You know, I just.

How did that make you feel and how did you overcome?

It's terrible, dude. Like, oh, wow. You know, I had that wrong, you know? Like I sold my 550 this year and there was people saying, oh, he lost his plane. He can't afford his plane anymore.

I'm about to bigger one. It's stupid, dude.

Like, I got another plane on order. I'm not going to tell him that. But it just, it reminds me of that, of me. This was me. This is what I used to do.

You used to talk trash?

No, I used to, I wouldn't talk trash. But I would secretly misunderstand their success and not want it for them. Because I couldn't have it.

I want them to fail or not to be as big.

Or, you know, I know they're doing the wrong thing. This ain't gonna turn out good.

Right.

Secretly, quietly, confusingly wishing it in for them.

What happened?

Because I misunderstood success.

What happens when we do that as individuals towards a friend, a peer, or a family member?

Well, you can't model them. You can't hate it and model it.

Right.

So if I'm secretly like, oh, that's the wrong thing to do, I'm missing, Dude, what are they doing right? You know, the number one, the number one. There was a car dealer in a town that I lived in. He wouldn't hire me. He was the number one car dealer. This guy, you could not turn the TV on without seeing his ads. He didn't like me because I was aggressive. I would. I would follow a customer to his store. Okay, let's go over there and shop together. He hated my guts because of that. He's not around anymore, but he was the most successful car dealer in that City. 'cause he spent money on advertising. And I didn't. And I wanted to hate on that. Because I didn't. Not because he did, but because I didn't. And I missed the whole education. Dude, I wasted 25 years in criticizing and negativity and hate. A low level grade of hate, but it was like, dude, you can't hate and learn at the same time.

What should we be doing instead, as opposed to hating someone who's succeeding?

If you have this, Just a brace, like if you have this response, like, I don't like what he does. Immediately, I'll bet you money, if you could just drop that and learn, what is he doing? What is he doing that I need to know? You know, like that's my red light right now, or caution light is, okay? You know, if I don't like something somebody's doing, I'm like, okay, what do I need to learn?

Mmm, that's a good.

So it's got a little, it's got a little bit of a warning. to me, you know, slow down, Grant. So when I started putting that in, you know, some, somebody came to, actually, I started putting that in about 12 years ago. And a guy told me about Facebook. He left and the light went off. And I said, Hey, what can you learn there?

How well has Facebook done for you in the last 12 years?

Pretty good. Pretty good. Same problem I had with Instagram. When Instagram came out, I'm like, I ain't got time for another one of these.

Same problem for TikTok.

Same, same, exactly all of them.

Powerful stuff, man. Well, I always appreciate you opening up.

Appreciate you, man. Appreciate you.

Can't wait. Best in the business, man.

Thanks, man. I can't wait to have you back.

On in a year. Talking about, let's see, I got some.

Big goals to talk about 10 billion this end of this year. Where do you think it'd be by.

The end of this year? End of this year, I think we get to, I think we get to.

6 billion this year. What would it take to get to 8?

What would it take from you? If I double, bro, we're gonna party hard. What would it take from you, though? What would need to happen for you to go from four to eight in a year? And what's holding you back from doing it in one year?

Just mechanics. Like, I'm like, I'm not sure.

You said this mechanics thing every time. You said this is the first time we did this.

It is. But before it's mechanics, it's an agreement that I could get there. I mean, I know I could get there. I could actually do it.

Eight by the end of the year.

Yeah, I could do it. But some special heavens would have to open up.

What would have to happen? Give me three next steps.

Okay, well I have to raise a billion dollars.

Okay.

From who? So for me to go from four to eight, I need to raise one.

Billion in one year. To get four, to get three billion worth of.

To buy four billion dollars worth of real estate. Okay, you need. I'd have to go, I'd have to raise a billion dollars. I need to raise maybe, maybe 800 million.

Okay. More.

800 million. Yeah.

So you need 800 million. That's less than 100 million a month.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 80 million a month, right?

What is that?

Yeah, yeah.

Is that what it is?

I gotta get busy, bro. We gotta end this part. Let me go get aggressive. See, you're putting me back in that.

Mode where, see, this is the problem.

Who can you empower to do that for you? No, no, I mean, it's a lot of money, bro. It's like, you know, that's, that's, yeah, there are five people that can split up. But see, here's the other thing though, because, well, yeah, I know, but I could go get all that money from one lender. I could go to one group that I mentioned earlier. And you don't want to. I, well, I could, but it's not really the way I want to do it. Okay? So I could go to them and say, look, I got a hundred million. I need 900. I could get the whole deal done with one group. And I mentioned their name.

Right.

Okay.

So you don't want to work with them.

Yeah.

Well, right now, one day I will.

Yes.

Work with them. But if I feed them now, you know, if I invite them to my table now, they'll invite me to theirs because they want me to keep sitting at their table. But I want to feed them later. And so, and also if I do that, then the audience, the people that I want to help, the story I really want to tell, the tens of thousands of families I could actually democratize this investment to, they won't get that. So that's that little compromise. So then I got to go back and be really aggressive, or I got to compromise myself and do business with this third way. It could be, it could be, you know, a part.

There's another way.

Yeah, there's always another way, dude. Dude, if we do this, okay? Me, you and Martha, we're going out, Elena, we're gonna go out, we're gonna watch a movie. Maybe you do drink that night.

There you go.

You know, but it'll be huge. I mean, we would have to double our investor base.

Okay, so that's one step.

Yeah.

Double your investor base. I know Ryan's listening somewhere.

Yeah.

Double your investor base.

Man, I got to go buy, I got to go buy 12,000 apartments.

12,000 apartment units.

I've spent my entire career putting together 12,000 units.

That's what you have right now.

Yeah.

So you need to do that this year.

This year. I got to do 20 years of work in one year.

Well, that's why you've been working two decades to build this.

I should be getting better, right? And I have to find empathy. while I do it. Okay. I like it. We'll check back in a year.

I like it. We'll check it back in a year. Appreciate it.

Thanks, brother. Appreciate you, man.

So how do you start making more money doing the same things you're already doing now? Well, if you have a business or a side hustle that you're currently running, I always tell people that there are a handful of ways to do this. Number one, you can increase your rates or prices right now. If you're a consultant who has 10 clients, then increasing your.