How Corey Geary Transitioned His Life from Real Estate Investing to Crypto

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek. His favorite niche real estate website, thelandgeek.com and on this week's Art of Passive Income podcast, I have Corey Geary. And if not familiar with Corey, he was a seven figure house flipper that became a millionaire in crypto, and now he helps other entrepreneurs do the same. But what's interesting about Corey is that he actually looks at things that cash flow in the crypto space. Corey, Gary, welcome.

Oh, man, Mark, thank you so much. I appreciate you inviting me on. It's a blessing and honor to be here today.

So, Corey, let's just rewind the tape.

Yeah.

And let's talk about how you became. First of all, I got in real estate and then transitioned into crypto.

Yeah, I think it's good to kind of like tell the story from the beginning. You know, I got into real estate about a decade ago and I tell people real estate actually saved my life because I was a drug addict, I was an alcoholic. When I got into real estate, I was going nowhere fast. And all I was doing, I was chasing the dollar. And that's what got me into real estate. And it forced me to level up my life, my spiritual, mental, physical, by being in rooms like people like yourself, in masterminds. And I was able to learn how to level up spiritually, mentally. Now I've been sober for multiple years. I have a family and I live in Puerto Rico. Like, that would never have happened if it went for real estate and, and changing my mindset, learning to love myself, changing my spirituality, and it was just an absolute blessing. But through that journey, I built what I called a seven figure prison, where in the end of 20, well, actually the beginning of 2022, I had this beast of a business where I had like 17 employees, was making multiple seven figures, but I was working, you know, 15, 16 hours a day. It was a multiple lawsuits. I even had a lawsuit going on with the attorney general. I mean, it was insane. And I was just, you know, I was absolutely miserable. Had all this money. It was great. I was making all this money, great business, but man, it was just not where I wanted to be at in life. And I went on a spiritual journey. At the time. I read the book the Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, one of the most powerful books I've ever read in my life, changed my entrepreneurial journey to teach me to stop clawing my way to success and let God or the universe guide your way to success. Success. And at the time, I was already dabbling with Cryptocurrency. And I was having a little bit of success with it. I was like, man, I already knew it was one of the highest appreciating asset classes known to mankind. Already knew in 2020 and 21, it created more millionaires and billionaires than any other asset class, including real estate. And I thought to myself, what if I actually buckled down, got serious about this, and treated it like an actual asset class versus like a casino? And that's what I did. I joined masterminds, I hired a private mentor, I started going to events. And by the end of 2022, I was making so much money and passive income from cryptocurrency that it pelled in comparison to my real estate business. And I shut my real estate company down, let all my team members go. I was even coaching real estate at the time I stopped doing that. And that's when I did move to Puerto Rico. And now I've bought my time back. I do what I want, with whom I want, however I want, which defines my, my life as far as far as success. I define success in my life. And it's been absolutely beautiful. Now we help other entrepreneurs do the same through our community and mastermind. And it's just been so much fun, man. And yeah, that's kind of like the high level 5 minute in a nutshell.

So, yeah, yeah, there's so much there to unpack. You know, it's interesting when I, you know, when, when people tell me that, you know, they, they were, you know, suffering with, with drug or drugs or alcohol abuse and, you know, addicts, and I, I, I always think, well, we're all addicts in some way. And I always think about that. Gabor, mate quote, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And, you know, so interesting that people are able to, you know, go on that journey and, and sort of, you know, put the light on it and shine it and then come out of it in, in a, in an incredible way. And then they become stronger, more resilient. And you find that those people tend to have the biggest hearts and want to help others because they've suffered so deeply. And then as Far as the Untethered Soul, it's one of my favorite books as well. And, you know, it's, it's, you know, I meditate every day. It's, it's one of those things where, when you, when you see it, you can't unsee it. And, and you become less attached to the thoughts, you become less attached to everything. In a sense, it's not that you're unattached in a, in a cold way. You're just, you're not clinging and you're not suffering.

Right? So not your thoughts, you're not your body, you're not your identity. Once you realize some of these things, it, it changes your perspective in life.

No, no, for sure, for sure. But what's interesting to me is that you, you know, you built this basically a great job for yourself, right? It was a prison. And then you're like, okay, there's a better way to do this. And you went into crypto. Now, what was interesting to me is when I think of crypto, I think of gambling. And when I think of the stock market, most people do, I, I think of gambling. So tell me why you're, you're calling it an asset class. And it, it's, you know, it's not gambling. And you can create passive income. Can we talk a little bit about that?

For sure. And I believe anytime you treat any asset class like gambling, you are going to lose. I, I'll give you a real quick snippet. Like, that's how I used to treat real estate in the very beginning. And in fact, on my third deal, I lost $250,000. It wiped me out. And that's why I started wholesaling and I started getting into novations and these other strategies in real estate. But I, because I didn't have mentorship, I wasn't taking it serious. It was like I watched the TV show Fix and Flop. I'm like, oh, I could do that. These guys make 80 grand in 20 minutes. I could do that. Now reality set in. And because I was treating it like a casino, I was just like, throwing money at it and thought money would come back. Crypto's the same way. If you go in and just start throwing money around at it because you're seeing all your friends kind of get wealthy with it, or you're seeing, you know, people on the 5 o' clock news buying Lamborghinis, whatever it may be. It's the hottest, newest, newest thing. That's why you're getting in while you're getting in at the top, for one, and for two, you're treating it like a casino. And you're throwing money around without doing proper due diligence, without doing proper research. Now, without understanding how cryptocurrency, what is used for, the actual use case, the utility, why it was created, why it's here. These are all the questions in the stuff that you need to start digging about. Or start learning about if you want to start treating it like an asset class and start understanding how this works under the hood. And once you start understanding the utility of cryptocurrency, you'll also see there's a lot of ways of making passive income and legitimate passive income. I ask real estate investors all the time, would you ever buy a rental property and not put a tenant place? And they go, no, that's crazy. Why do you treat your crypto like that? You go on a coinbase or crypto.com and you buy Ethereum and you hope the number go up. Do you realize you could pull that Ethereum off of Coinbase, put it on the Ethereum blockchain and mine the blocks with that Ethereum. It doesn't require any work by you, it doesn't require any electricity like Bitcoin does. Elliot does your computer works. Your computer is doing all the work. It's a server. And you earn more Ethereum. But people don't know that. They don't realize that. They just go on and treat it like a casino like you said. They go buy Ethereum, hope the number go up. And usually they're doing that at the wrong time of the market cycle. You want to be coming into this asset class when people are fearful. It's the old Warren Buffett saying, buy when people are fearful, sell when they're greedy. It's never held more true than in crypto, because crypto so volatile. But right now is a great time to get involved. We just had the Bitcoin having. We got, you know, the, the presidential election coming up. We got a lot of other, you know, kind of like economy type stuff that's really bullish. And this is a great time to get involved. But if you wait to win, your Uber driver is telling you, oh, I made $50,000 on this dog coin. That's too late, don't get in. Then that's when you should be selling. You need to wait another four years because it works in four year cycles. So market cycles will crush you and they will also make you wealth beyond your imaginary, your wildest dreams. So market cycles are key.

Okay, so just to reiterate, number one, you have to do your due diligence.

Yes.

Number two, you have to understand that you can buy into say an asset class. And I don't know if Ethereum is an asset class or it's a coin where it's a blockchain. There's all these terms that we could unpack, but every, I think most people know about Bitcoin and Ethereum, there's lots of other coins that actually do have certain utilities. We can talk about that in a minute. So you want a coin that actually has some utility to it and then you want to make sure that it can cash flow. But most importantly, you want to make sure that you're buying and you're completely aware of where you are in the cycle and know when you're going to get out so that you're not wrecking yourself. So let's talk about some of those things. So number one, when you're doing due diligence, what are you looking for?

Okay, a few different things. You're looking for a protocol that has product market fit, that aims to solve a problem in the crypto space and they have a community that backs it. You want to see a cult like community, kind of like pre early Apple days. Apple, you know, that was like those guys who held that stock in the early days were, they are very cult like. And you want to see that in a cryptocurrency project. We saw it in Bitcoin, we saw it in Ethereum in the early days. We want to see that in any new protocol that's getting released. Two, you want to see what, how the code is written. Now you don't have to go and be the person that learns how to read code, but a good cryptocurrency project should have audits and so you should get to go in there and read the audits. Audits are just a third party entity that's coming out and basically they're reading the code and they're telling you what, what, what's inside. Is there any, any problems? Is it, is it locked tight? Right. Is there admin keys? What are the admin keys? Allow the founders to do stuff like that. And you want to better go in there and read those audits and know how to read those audits. Also you want to make sure the founder has a track record. You don't want to be investing in some guy who's coding in his mom's basement. You want to make sure this guy has either launched cryptocurrencies that have been very successful before. Maybe he's got business acumen in real life that he's done well. Maybe he's been an entrepreneur and he's, you know, created multiple businesses and now he's in crypto and he's, he's building stuff on the blockchain. So you obviously want to do research on the founder just like you do when you, when you invest in A real estate project. When I'm investing in a syndication, I want to know who the operator is, what is his track record, what has he been doing and how well has he done in his journey. I need to know that stuff if I'm going to give him my hard earned money. This is no different. It is no different. And so those are some of the things that we look for when we're doing due diligence. And we want to look to see how what's, what's built under the hood is this, is this thing have good fundamentals, it has a good tokenomics. This is a crypto word. Tokenomics just means it's built to pump and it's built for, you know, has product market fit, basically. And yeah, a lot of this stuff, man, it creates passive income. People don't realize it. Now, to get real passive income in crypto, you have to get into what's called defi, decentralized finance. This is where you're engaging on the blockchain, engage in the code on the blockchain yourself. And this takes a little bit of learning. This is not something that, you know, it's not as easy as going to Coinbase and buying the newest dog coin. You have to understand how to do this and you have to put the reps in and the hours in to to be able to navigate your way around in defi. But this is what, how, this is real crypt crypto and the way crypto was intended to be used. And I'll give you one more thing before I know you're probably gonna have some more questions. What another a great way of making passive income in crypto. What is Coinbase's business model? Well, all they do is offer up assets for the marketplace to come and trade in and out of, and they earn all the fees. In fact, Binance makes $24 billion a year with a B. It's insane. That's their business model, right? Well, in Defi, since I don't buy my coins off of Coinbase or Binance, where do I buy my coins? Peer to peer. So say, for example, I own Ethereum and Hex. These are two cryptocurrencies. I can put them in a liquidity pool. In Defi, the marketplace will trade in and out of them. I earn all the fees on the Coinbase. I'm the Binance. Real cryptocurrency gives power back to the people that once only big banks and centralized entities used to have.

Okay, so now you're speaking my language. Because in the land business, though, the way we do it, we are, we are the bank. And yes, that's, that's essentially what our, our model.

Yes.

And yeah. And so let's, I mean, explain to me like I'm a, I'm a seven year old what is a coin and what is the blockchain.

So let's start with the blockchain because that'll probably be easiest. So the blockchain, all it is is a big online ledger. That's it. In fact, when you're mining, that's one form of passive income, what your computer does, it's now a puzzle piece to the blockchain. It's a piece of the blockchain because your computer executes the transactions on this ledger. It validates the ledger, what we call holding consensus and then it also makes new blocks. What's a block? A block is just a place where information is stored. It's this ledger. So I get all this information gets stored on the ledger. The block gets filled and it gets pushed down the line. Your computer or somebody's computer who's mining makes a new block, then they fill the info and it keeps going like that forever. And that's why it's called a block chain. And you can look back in time all the way to what we call the Genesis block. We'll use Ethereum as an example. Ethereum came out in 2000, I think it was 13 or 14. You can look back at the Genesis block when Ethereum was created and all the information stored in that block all the way up to current present time. And that's what's so beautiful about blockchain. It's fully transparent. And so that's what it is. It's just a big online ledger. So that's blockchain right now on the blockchain you have these different currencies that get filled into the ledger. And you could have something like Ethereum has, I think almost a million different currencies that are created on it. And what's great about Ethereum versus Bitcoin, Bitcoin only had one use case. It was to send and receive. That was it economic value. So I have this economic value which is called Bitcoin, which is just a coin, which is a unit for the ledger and I could send it and receive it. Well, when Ethereum came out, they came out what was called smart contracts. Now this makes your money programmable, which is really cool. So you can do liquidity providing, which is where you become the coinbase. You can do other type of utility, like for example, there's a protocol in the blockchain where there's leverage trading. I don't leverage trade. But anytime somebody takes a leverage out there, they have to pay a fee by the hour or all the fees go. They go to the holder of the coin that is represented by the protocol. So it's like a, like a crypto dividend, right? Because there's no CEO and there's no management team that owns the protocol. It's just code. So you have all these different use cases or now programmable money where it actually does something besides just send and receive. Another good example, hex. Hex is a CD on the blockchain where you can lock your money up like a cd, like a traditional CD at the bank. And all the bank is, you're getting inflation on your money while it's locked up. Well, you can do the exact same thing on the blockchain, but it's very controlled inflation and you're earning a little and you pick the date, you want to lock it up and unlock it, but you're earning more and more as your money's locked. So there's another good example of a coin and its use case on the blockchain. It's, what it's doing is bringing in traditional finance and it's, they're bringing that to the blockchain where everything is programmable and everything's transparent and everything is just code. Because do you trust humans or do you trust code? Well, I'll pick code every day of the week. Humans, you know, you know how humans are. We make mistakes, we become evil sometimes. There's a lot of different problems, but what blockchain is, code is law, and that's what's great about it. So we're slowly navigating that way. There has to be, you know, there's more and more innovations that are coming out inside of the blockchain. Technology that's going to allow for full basic, I, I, I, I believe where the dollar is going away. It's going to, it will be 100% digitally by the time my daughter's my age. There will no longer be the dollar that you hold in your wallet, what we call fiat. And so it's just a matter of the innovation coming into play and adoption coming into play, which we're seeing every market cycle, we see the adoption double.

So, I mean, this is a big topic and we don't have that much time. It is a lot to unpack. So given the time that we have, I know for me personally, I've played around with it and I've won and I've lost. So I have a mine, I mine dogecoin and litecoin and every day I convert it to Bitcoin. Now I'm going to start converting to Ethereum after talking to you. So, so I do that and I bought into a dao and I lost just about everything. It was, it was a, basically a Ponzi scheme.

And I got one question for that part. When did you buy into that Dow? What year?

I think it was 2021.

The top. If you had done your research and due diligence on market cycles, you would not have been buying into that Dow at that particular time. You would have been selling. Had you been in prior bear market, that was the time to sell, not the time to get in.

Yeah, and what, you know, we've talked before, I love your philosophy of, you know, make money during the, the cycle in crypto and then when you get out go into real estate. So you've got wealth creation and wealth preservation.

That's right.

And you know, it's a fascinating topic. So for those who are skeptical, the smartest people I know love crypto and the smartest people I know hate crypto. And so it's really interesting, what is the counter argument to the people that say crypto has really no utility?

I mean, the counter argument is that it's just monetary value stored on the blockchain. If you want to use it at just the basic level. Right. You can come in and buy bitcoin and you can see there is a monetary value there that's been stored there that's gone up actually 6.5 million x meaning if you put $1 into 2009 when Bitcoin first emerged and sold the last top, well, you would have had $6.5 million. Now I know you're not that you wouldn't have sold the top and there's a bunch of other stuff, but still the, the data is there, the facts are there. It's up to you to go look at the data and go look at the facts. This is the highest appreciating asset class known to mankind. There's no other asset class has created more millionaires and billionaires than cryptocurrency. Go do the data, go do the research. Last market cycle in 2020 and 21, 88,000 millionaires and billionaires were born out of this asset class. I know some of them here in Puerto Rico. That's why I moved to Puerto Rico. Twofold taxes and then also I wanted to be around people who had bigger portfolios than me, but that's why they moved here, is because they got the same on the taxes. So it's, it's absolutely insane how early we still are in this asset class and that people are still turning their nose to it because there's not enough proof in the pudding, if you will. But if you wait till there's enough proof in the pudding or enough, you know, positive sentiment or like, like a surety, like real estate. It's so easy because real estate's been around for so long and we want to make sure there's, you know, surety and what we're investing and it's easy to do. But by the time you do that with crypto, a lot of times it's too late. You know, you've missed that massive run up. And there will be a time where the adoption will be pretty big, like most of the world will be in this asset class. But by time that happens and also there'll be a lot of regulation, then by time that happens, cryptocurrency, the volatility will be gone. It will be more like the stock market. And so if you want those really outlandish gains, you got to take risk, you got to be early. And that's only the believers are the ones who do well. I mean, if you talk to some of those early bitcoin OG guys, everyone said they were crazy, they were insane. And now there's these billionaires out here, they've never owned real estate, they've never owned a business. All they did was hold some bitcoin for the last 10 years. And so you just got to point to the data and the facts. And some people will come along for the ride and some won't. And that's fine. It's all depending on how your, I think your risk muscle is. Everyone's got a bit of a different risk muscle and how they, how they allocate risk. But eventually I believe that we, there'll be full world adoption to this asset class. It fixes a problem in humanity. It gives us self sovereignty. It teaches us to be our own bank. Permissionless money. Listen to that word. Nothing in our life is permissionless. When we go out to eat, use a credit card, we have to use a third party permission. When we go to the bank and pull money out, we need the bank's permission. Everything we do in life requires permission. True defi blockchain crypto is permissionless. My brother sent me $20,000 on a Sunday night at 1 in the morning. From Arizona to Puerto Rico, I got the money in about 10 seconds to. So I could create some miners for him. You can't do that in tradfi. And it was permissionless. It was beautiful. Right? And these are some of the ethos beyond of like, okay, coming in this asset class and just making money. There's a lot more when you peel the layers back.

Amazing. There's. There's so much more to unpack here, Corey. But unfortunately, we. We're out of time. But at this point in the podcast and your. Your mentorship has been great, I want to, for one more tip of the week, a website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

Oh, man. It's work on self development over anything else. The one thing I've learned is, you know, through spiritual and mental self development, everything else got elevated. And through that I have learned. One thing that's very controversial is what is your why? And I got news for you. Your why is not your kids. Your why is not your family. Your why is because you want time, freedom. None of that stuff should be your why. Until you get to a point in your life where your why is self love. And knowing that you believe the abundance God has put in front of you, you still have work to do. I still have work to do, but that should be your why. And it sounds selfish, but you can't learn to love another until you learn to love yourself. And. And it's the same with wealth and everything else in life, you know, and there's a lot of books I can point to where I've learned these things, like the Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill. There's just a couple at the top of my head. The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. This stuff. Oh, Dr. Joe Dispenza, breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. These things have taught me how to have self love, self respect, and know I deserve abundance. And that is my why.

I love it. I actually, I have not read Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.

Amazing.

But I own the book, so I've.

Just got to get to Amazing.

Yeah. All right, fantastic. Well, Corey, thank you so much. My tip of the week is learn more about what Corey and his partner Dane are doing. Defi Cash Flow systems dot com. Defi Cash Flow systems dot com. They will educate you and they will make sure that you do not get wrecked like I did in the crypto market and do that.

I have a Passive income.

We make a much passive income. Absolutely.

That's what we love.

Yeah, absolutely. Also, I just want to remind people that today's podcast is sponsored by flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks and transform your life. Go up that mountain of land, investing quickly, safely and efficiently. And I know you're thinking, what about the tuition? Ain't gonna cost you nothing. Guaranteed you're gonna make it back in 180 days or less. It just shows you did the work. Learn more. Go to landgeek.comforward/training and schedule a call thelandgeek.com forward/training Also, I want to thank the listeners. Remind you the only way I'm gonna get Corey and Dane to come back is if you do three favors. Follow rate Review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review support@thelangic.com I'm going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich and if you don't want the book, just do it selfishly. So Corey and Dan will come back and keep educating us. Corey, are we good?

We're good, man. I appreciate it's been an honor to come on and this has been a blessing. So thank you, Mark. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Corey. Look forward to part two. Thanks everybody. Let freedom ring.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast Podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com forward slash training. Let freedom ring.