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

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

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

This idea that quality is senior to quantity is wrong. Quantity is senior to the quality. It's so arrogant to think that anybody's going to get one quality painting. I don't know how many pieces Bango did. I think he only sold one piece his whole life. He did hundreds and hundreds of pieces. When we first started doing social media, I was 52 years old. This is 2012.

I saw the internet. I saw social media and I'm like, oh my God, dude. This is, this is, I'm going to get known. I told my wife, she was an actor. She came back from an audition one day and she was crying. She's like, oh, it was terrible. It was terrible. I'm like, baby, I'm gonna make you famous.

I discovered YouTube today. And we're gonna get millions and millions of people to know our name and you'll never have to do another audition. I didn't see the quality first. We would take a phone, turn it sideways, no lighting. We didn't have the little O rings. We didn't have Zoom calls. We didn't have setups, dude.

Nothing. I had an iPhone four or something. Just one video at a time. I still had that first video up there. I think it had like 85 views over like 13 years. We do this 3-3-2 rule. You call me today, you're interested. I'm calling you three times today, three times tomorrow, and two times on the third day. We know that formula. Now you're going to be like, oh, my guy, bro, don't call me eight times. Yeah, I'm going to call you eight times.

How did you become such a dominant force? I became that because I was terrified to be ignored. You created the 10x rule, which says that people underestimate by 10x what it takes to succeed. Why do you think people so systematically underestimate how hard it is to succeed? If you underestimate the initial goal, you're going to underestimate how hard it's going to be. Like, nobody would ever write a business plan and include COVID. You know, you wouldn't write a business plan and include madame raising property taxes in New York City. But I was just buying an apartment complex there back in November. And then we're going to end up with a new mayor that says we're going to raise property taxes on everybody.

Or you go to California and they're going to, you know, raise a wealth tax and drive billionaires. Who would include that in a business plan? You would never do that because if you did all that, you would never do anything. So I think the reason people underestimate how hard it's going to be and how much work it's going to take is because they go in idealistically saying, I'm going to call 10 people, I thought them are going to buy it from me. Or maybe, David, the business is a trillion dollar industry and I'm going to get 1% of it because it seems like such a tiny number and you're going to get rich. That's not how it's going to work. You're probably going to get 0.000-0-0-1% of that industry. And people simply underestimate.

So the 10x rule was basically like whatever you think, and this is an arbitrary, by the way, completely made up. It's not science. 10x rule sounds a lot better than the 1,000x rule, but it's probably more like a thousand times. If you think you need to call on 10 people, you probably ought to multiply times 10 and it's going to be 100. If you think it's going to be 100, you know, 10x it's going to be 1,000. It's going to be harder and it's going to be better than you ever imagine, by the way. That's the upside of the 10x rule. Okay.

Whatever you think it, you know, your dream, when you hit your dream, I mean, if it's a real dream, if it's really, really impactful, not only will it be 10 times harder, but it's going to be 10 times better than you thought. Is this because the schooling system doesn't prepare you? Is it lack of role models? What specifically creates this gulf between how much people think they need to do and how much they actually do? You have a seven-time better chance of becoming a millionaire in America than you do of having apps. I happen to have both. Okay.

So it's because people underestimate everything all the way from our schooling, you know, our parents. You know, we go to school for 12 years. By the way, that was dumb. We had to check off our little test and get our little A. And then you think you're going to go into the marketplace and be a success. You're not. They're not even teaching success there. There's no classes on examples of billionaires.

Why isn't there? Why are eighth graders not learning about billionaires or the founders of this country or the wealthiest people on planet Earth and how they did it? They don't teach it. They don't teach investing. they don't teach the rule of 72. They don't teach compounding. Like there's nothing being taught at a school level.

Now, AI is going to change all that. But it's still not going to show you the amount of effort and push. We don't have a rejection course in school. Why not? Kids should learn how to be rejected and get flat on it. So it doesn't bother them. So they don't have this go-to, I'm an introvert. Now, you're not an introvert, dude.

You just never spend enough time extroverting. Because any human being can be an introvert and an extrovert. And look, you've got a lot of people on your show, you know, you've had Alex here. He would appear to be very extroverted. I know Alex. He's not always extroverted any more than I am. You know, catch me on a public flight going across, you know, flying from Miami to Dubai. I'm going to sit up there.

I'm probably not going to talk to anybody for 11 hours. So I think that school is just not teaching people how hard it can be. And this is the problem in America, too. Americans are entitled people. And you see it across the spectrum. That's why immigrants do so well in this country. Guy comes here and just scarches America, just like does so well because he's so hungry.

One, and number two, and probably his superpower is he has no issues with entitlement. He thinks he deserves nothing. Where Americans take for granted almost everything, they take for granted a 40-hour work week, air condition, heaters, a car, a garage, days off, President's Day, Christmas, a bonus. It's so much bullshit that we take for granted in this country that has made us lazy. And then we pass that on to our kids. You know, why aren't kids going to school on Saturdays and Sundays and getting out in eight

years rather than 12? They should. I homeschooled both my kids. My first kid was out of high school just at her 15th birthday. To play devil's advocate, these skills like extroversion dealing with the rejection, could they really be taught in the classroom? 100% they can be taught. You know, here's a phone, here's a phone, raise money for the school.

we're raising money for the football team, start calling. Yeah, you can teach rejection. Most painful thing you'll ever learn in your life, by the way, is somebody not answering the phone. Forget them hanging up on you. Forget them not. Say, never call me again. I've already given enough money, okay?

My kid didn't make the football team. Whatever the kid has to handle, that's nothing compared to them simply not picking up the phone and being ignored. But these are the kind of things that kids could be taught. Like we do internships here at Cardone Capital, 10X health systems, our education company.

And we have people intern. We had two kids in this week from a family in Chicago. And I'm like, pick up the phone, make the call. You've got to make 85 phone calls a day. The most painful thing is going to be not what they tell you, but the fact that they never pick up the phone, never answer your phone call and never call you back. So even just being those practical, David,

those practical pick up the phone, easy the first time. But on the 12th call and nobody's answered, that phone becomes heavier and heavier. It becomes more and more difficult to live. literally just be ignored. And I've heard people say this. I don't like that game because the rejection. The rejection is not the issue. Being ignored as a human being, it's a spiritual entity. As a person trying to add value in the marketplace, being ignores is probably the most painful thing.

And anybody that's ever done a startup and had a great idea, you know what I mean. I've interviewed eight billionaires. So you're now the ninth billionaire. And one of the things that they all have in common is they have extreme strengths and they also have extreme weaknesses. Have you found that to be the case in the top performers? I would agree with that with everybody. Every human being has, you know, you have assets and liabilities, and you should know them. And just like you should know your assets. And do you think the schooling system misrepresents what it takes to be successful in that getting an A-minus across the board isn't really helpful?

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That context turns raw signal into conviction. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Check it out for yourself at alpha-sense.com slash how I invest. Yeah, 100, dude, 100%. I mean, you know, you're going to go, your kids are going to school. Your kids can't even tell me what assets and liabilities are on financial statement, not your kids, but I'm just saying the average kid can't because they're parent can. Their average parent in America will have their home as an asset on their financial

statement. When in truth, it's a liability. So if I don't know my personal financial statement assets and liabilities, how could I possibly know my own? So as a business owner, I have many assets and I have many liabilities. Also, there's a point in my trajectory, in my growth as an entrepreneur and as a business owner and as a person where my assets actually become my liabilities. You know, my confidence, not having confidence is the liability. Having it is an asset. But I can end up with so much confidence that my asset becomes a liability again because it comes off as arrogance. So, in fact, I believe all assets at some point in time as they grow, as you scale them, they become they become a liability.

And all liabilities, like, I tend to not let people finish. Like, I hear your question. I want to go, right? So that's cool because it's transparent because I'm not thinking about, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not thinking about what your audience needs to hear. You're just going to get the very authentic version of me, but it's a liability because I didn't let you finish, dude.

You know, you might not feel good about it. Maybe you didn't finish your whole question, and my wife's going to hate it because this is what I do to her all the time. Speaking of language, you use words like dominate when you talk about capturing market share. Tell me about your language. You have some great questions, man. I've got to tell you, I've done a lot of interviews.

I appreciate your curiosity of the subject and what drives a person. Like curiosity is so important. Look, I just know from marketing, I grew up in a time. I grew up in one, without any money, and two, I grew up in a time where the only marketing you could get was to buy as. There was three channels, newspapers, billboards, maybe, and TV and radio. And I didn't have any money. If you don't have any money.

and the only way to get your message out is to, you know, buy an ad or direct mail. You had to fund it, right? So now here, fast forward. Here we are today in Instagram and TikTok and you don't need money now to market. But if you market once, if I market today and don't market tomorrow, the world will know me today and forget me tomorrow. So the only way you have to dominate, Sir Hant, you've had him on Ryan, you've had on the show. All these guys are doing a great job of dominating their space.

They're number one. I wrote a book called If You're Not First, Your Last. And that book is not a, it wasn't a Ricky Bobby book, okay? Which, by the way, I didn't know about until I wrote the book. And everybody's like, you're knocking off Ricky Bobby. I'm like, not even know who Ricky Bobby was, even though I'm from the South. If you're not first, your last was really about you have to be first on the mind and the consumer. The consumer does not buy the best.

product ever. The consumer buys the best known product. The perceived illusion of what's best or what's most known. Power tends to be assigned to that thing that's most omnipresent. So whatever bank is most omnipresent in your marketplace is the most trusted bank. If it's Wells Fargo and you see them on every street corner, it's the most trusted. If it's the Starbucks, Starbucks does not spend any money in advertising, but they'll have locations that are very concentrated. So you're going to move every six blocks where there's a lot of free money, a lot of easy money to get, you know, where there's, you know, people have an extra $8. You're going to see a Starbucks, a Starbucks.

Go to New York City. You'll see one on every, you can see one on the corner of every block of one block because they're seeking dominance and omnipresence. And they're also trying to hit you knowing, hey, if you walk another block, you're going to see this again. Even though you rejected the first store, the second store, boom, third store, you're buying a coffee that you didn't even need. it's the rule of seven which is you need to see something seven times before you buy unpack that

a little bit more this perceived illusion what are the components of that how did you become such a dominant force break that down well i became my what if i'm a dominant force i became that because i was terrified to be ignored i was terrified of being ignored and i had these good ideas my whole career i come up with these good ideas every like eight or ten years and then you got to push a new idea into the marketplace and nobody wants to hear it like and nobody's going to hear it because nobody's thinking about your great idea. Look, Jesus was ignored. I mean, Muhammad Ali was ignored. Donald Trump was definitely ignored. I mean, the impetus and energy behind Donald Trump today is the fact that he was ignored by the New York elites. Nobody ever

talks about this today. But you need something that's going to drive you to push this idea to the marketplace. And your concept of seven, right, is that we make 8,300 phone calls a day, outbound phone calls a day from our offices on a minimum. That's the lowest number we'll hit all year. And we know that we have to contact a customer at least eight times. You hit my website and said, I'm interested in this thing that's happening this weekend. And you hit me at 2 o'clock in the morning or 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

And we weren't available to take it right then and there. I have to call you eight times to get you on the phone once. I probably have to get you on the phone 12 times to close the deal. On men on average. And it could be. that goes back to that 10x rule people call they say no they're like well it didn't work well you you should have called 12 times yeah like like we we do this three three two rule okay you call me today you're interested i'm calling you three times today three times tomorrow and two times on the third day

we know that formula now you're going to be like oh my god bro don't call me uh what is that eight times yeah i'm going to call you eight times i had a guy a dm me yesterday on twitter or on x man your guys are relentless he's like they're terrible He's like, they keep just trying to sell me. And I'm like, yeah, exactly, bro. And the reason we keep trying to sell you is you keep trying to resist us. And if you think I'm going to tell my guys to back off on you, you're wrong. If you're qualified and you really want my product and my product is really good,

I'm going to keep hammering you until you do it. Okay, until the nail goes in. And a lot of people don't like this, okay? They don't like it because they don't do it. You don't like it because it's wrong. You don't like it because you don't do it. And you can't even imagine doing it. And you don't want it done to you.

Okay. But understand the only person that resists us, is the person that didn't buy from us. The other people have already bought. So we think there's about 12% that will fall off the tree. The other 88% have to be pulled. I have to climb into the tree. I have to yank on the branch.

I have to use tremendous amounts of effort to pull that apple out. Okay. Otherwise, if I just wait until it falls out of the tree, it's on the ground, and I might not be there this weekend to pick it up, and then it spoils. So unless you're a monster company, unless you're lucky enough to be connected to the CIA and be meta, or Amazon or Tesla, and you got your funding from those guys.

Okay, well, good for you. I don't have that. Okay. Mr. Beas, he can do quality because he's got funding from Silicon Valley. I do not have that. I have no funding, so I have to use more effort. And so that's what I would tell people. I'll get back to the 10-ext rule.

You're underestimating the amount of resistance you're going to get in the marketplace. It goes back to this axiom in sales, which is somebody's getting sold on the phone call. Either you're selling them to buy or they're selling you. they don't they shouldn't buy. There's a sale made on every every call even when they don't pick up. Now I'm not going to take this phone call. That's a that's a sale. The sale was made. Every, we believe that every customer is qualified. There's no such thing. If you remember the Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, these leads are bad. There's no such thing as the lead. There's just leads. And all leads buy something. Okay. All leads buy something. And they're going to

buy water. They're going to buy food. They might not buy your product. But all leads are buyers. So there's no such thing that's something a buyer not qualified or they don't have the time or they can't make a decision. That's not true. I made a decision to take a breath of air. I took the time to take a breath of air. And like something's being sold at every moment. The person you're talking to is doing something when they hang up with you or don't answer the phone call with you. I asked Ryan Sirhan at this very question, which is how long do you follow up?

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

when we analyze the 18% that fell off, 65% of those are our best customers and buy our most expensive products. So you would think without all that data that the people that are unsubscribing or not buying, the truth is, the unsubscribed are our best VIP customers. They're just like, dude, I don't need the email anymore. Oh, by the way,

As soon as they go to their Instagram, they're going to see me again. Remember, I was emailing him, and he's trying to get away from me for a moment. But then he sees me on Instagram, or then he sees me on YouTube, or then he sees me on TikTok or sees me on Fox Business, or he sees me on David's podcast. But you're not getting away from me, okay? And those same people end up on the front row of one of our events. So it's just like, where are you going to see me?

And that's why I use this word omnipresence. You want to be in not one place, but all places. And anyone or anything or any product that can be viewed in multiple places, all at the same time, will be assigned some condition of power. I think a lot of this is just a fear of rejection or ego preservation. People justify by saying, well, if I piss them off now, they might not buy in 10 years. But statistically, you have this chance. The buying windows open.

They're either yes or you're unlikely to close them. I think there's this lack of urgency that people don't really apply. They think they have these thousands of years to convert them. Your mom told you, be seen and not heard. Quit asking me the same thing over and over. You get broken, dude. The school system breaks kids, sit in your chair and listen. It's a shame what happens that we do to people, that you're somehow going to be,

you're going to go to college and you're going to get a job. That's actually not happening. Okay. We have the highest unemployment of much college educated today that we've ever had in the history of education. Kids are getting an education and still can't get a job. They don't even know how to show up for the job. They don't know how to insist on the job. So they don't know how to do a job interview.

They don't know how to stand up from all the other job interviews. They don't know how to do a good short, tight video and say, hey, why hire me? Like, it's unbelievable what we're not teaching in this country, which, by the way, brings me to the biggest opportunity that we have now. Like, if you can be exceptional today, it is easier to stand out today than any other time in the history of the world. Why is that? Well, because, first of all, the opportunities are so much bigger now. You look at the Paul brothers, okay?

These guys, I mean, I have a big respect for both of them and what they built. Completely out of the box. Look at Mr. Beast. Okay. Went history if we ever had 20-year-olds making the kind of money these guys are making. And doing completely different things, by the way. I could just keep going down the list. You know about the 15-year-old kid that's on YouTube making a million bucks a month, like over and over. None of these stories were around 30 years ago or 15 years ago. None of this. Logan Paul is going to be a W.W.E. wrestler and his brother's going to make $92 million in a dumb-ass fight, a five-round fight.

Like it's unbelievable what people are doing. Mr. Bees has got a multi-billion-dollar business. it gets billions of views in a week. Like none of this was happening, okay? So I got a little company in here. I used to work in the automotive industry, and one of my mentors, they sold their company. They had, I don't know,

about 60 or 70 car dealerships. And they got a billion dollars for it. They spent two legacies building it. I have a company that has no inventory that's probably worth, the multiple company is probably worth $10 or $12 billion today if we put them all together. And I have no inventory, no cars,

only two locations, no debt. It's a different game today, man. If people can use AI today in social media and be curious, you know, and surround yourself with great people that believe in anything's possible and filter out all the other negativity that's going on right now, all the noise, the amount of noise is crazy. And you haven't been priced out. Inflation's not the boogeyman.

The U.S. dollar's not going to go away. there's never been a better time, David, in my mind, for people to get rich, for people to have freedom, and for people to do it their way. Said another way, traditional media is dead. People sitting around in a boardroom picking who's going to be the next star that's dead. Media is now democratized. If you could be good, which is extremely difficult because you are competing with everybody, but if you could be good, you capture all the upside that before was captured by a few celebrities.

Yeah, 100%. And I would just say that you have to be exceptional. You know, you can't. If you're going to be satisfied with good, you're going to be lumped in with everybody else. and exceptional takes, you know, it probably takes seven days a week and 80 hours a week. It's not going to be a 40-hour work week. It goes back to this 10X rule. And I just had a guest that wrote me this really nice note, which is like your phenomenal podcaster.

And I turned to my friend and I'm like, I'm a phenomenal recorder of podcasts because we're producing five episodes a week. And we've been doing this now for half a year. And we realize that the only way you say be exceptional, who doesn't want to be exceptional? Everybody wants to be exceptional. Even mediocre people want to be exceptional. But the real advice actually goes back to this 10-X rule, which is do more reps, do more, and you will become exceptional. You get quality through quantity.

Now, if you're one of those people that somehow figured out how to get a quality viral video one time, you keep your one viral video and I'll take my 15,000 attempts at video over your one viral video every day. Like if you ask me, hey, Grant, you want one viral video that gets a billion views or you want 15 or 20,000 video. I want the 15 or 20,000 videos, okay? Do I want 10,000 customers or do I want one, one customer? One guy to give me a billion dollars, or do I want, you know, 100,000 people to give me a billion?

I want the 100,000 people to give me the billion dollars. I want quantity, okay, because here's the thing that comes with quantity. If you do quality, if you just do quality one time, even if, let's say it's not quality and you just got lucky one time, you don't have the reps, okay? If I do something 15,000, now I have the success, I have the billion dollars and I got the 15,000 reps. Like the guy that only got, he got it out of his first score. He does not have that and he wonders if he was lucky. Okay. So, so you don't, you don't, you don't want the, you want the self-esteem builder. I mean, the greatest superpower a human being can have is tremendous self-esteem, belief in

self. Regardless of how you look today or how your hair looks today or your shirt or whatever, you're like, I believe in me and I don't need to look at this. I don't need to look at my trophies. I don't need to look at yesterday. Have belief in myself. Okay. Those are the people that they're threats like Elon. Elon is a massive threat. The amount of self-esteem this individual has, Donald Trump, okay, his self-esteem borders on insanity, okay, because it's like, how does this guy believe he can do this? I don't get it.

And now some of you're going to say narcissism and you're going to say, oh, he's diluted and whatever, dude, you could turn it to whatever level of mental illness you want to or wrongness or evil or whatever you want to do. But like if you take all that bullshit out and just look at the admiration point, you know, like how does a guy believe in himself? Is he crazy? Yeah. Maybe.

Maybe. But dude, I want some of that crazy. You know? And unfortunately, or fortunately, when you get to the top of the food chain of exceptionalism, however you guys define that, Barack Obama was exceptional. Okay. He was an exceptional human being. like the way his his orator skills, his delivery, his pulling people in. Clinton, okay,

unbelievable orator, okay? Like, it's not just Trump, right? You could go over the history of Democrats, Republicans, white, brown, male, female, unbelievable orators and delivery people and Connor McGregor, okay? He's got a lot of problems in his life right now, but unbelievable when he walked in that ring and controlled the USC. Like, I'm just looking for that greatness piece, not the neurosis part. And I'm like, how can I rob that guy?

How can I rob that piece? how can I become that and not dilute it with a whole bunch of, you know, negative, critical, oh, he's a narcissist and say, hey, the only way to become exceptional in anything is through reps. That's it. Okay. There is no other way. And I don't want to win the lottery ticket. I'd love to win the lottery.

I'd love to win the, every time there's a billion dollar lottery, I go buy one. Okay. But it's not how I expect to accumulate a billion dollars. And by the way, I'm crossing my fingers and I'm praying that I win that billion dollars. but I would rather earn a billion dollars over a career. I don't really mean this, by the way, to the lottery gods, okay? I would rather earn a billion dollars, save a billion dollars, invest a billion dollars over time, than win a billion dollars.

And to the lottery gods, I don't really mean that. So if you got one, you know, send it to me, dude. I'd rather have both, by the way. A lot of people realize that it takes a lot of reps to be successful, but a lot of people underestimate how those reps actually help your entire business. When you have those reps, everybody around you gets better. For us, our editors get better, the people that book our podcasts get better. Everything gets better if you do more.

And yet there's this perception that you can't do more and have high quality. And as you do more, your quality actually goes up. It's a paradox of sorts. 1,000%. This idea that quality is senior to quantity is wrong. Quality quantity is senior to the quality. Okay, you cannot get quality. It's so arrogant to think that anybody's going to get one quality painting.

Like, Van Gogh, I don't know how many pieces Van Gogh did. I think he only sold one piece his whole life. He did hundreds and hundreds of pieces, sometimes three and four and five and six pieces a day. It is so arrogant that people like, I got to get it right first. Dude, you're never going to get it right. Okay, you don't even know what right is in the beginning. Like 10 years from now, you won't even be doing what you thought was right. yesterday. So when we first started doing social media, I was 52 years old. This is 2012.

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

oh, dude, this is, I can put as much as I want up. Okay, I didn't see the quality first. We would take a phone, turn it sideways, no lighting. We didn't have the little O rings. We didn't have Zoom calls. We didn't have setups, dude. Nothing. Like, you look good. You got your little earpieces in, you got your mic. We didn't have any of that shit, bro. I had an iPhone four or something. No lighting, grainy, took forever to upload it. Right. Just one video at a time. I still had that first video up there. I think it had like 85 views over like 13 years. We have a cultural norm in my company, which is you celebrate shitty first versions. I love that. Whenever somebody does something the first time, everyone celebrates the shitty. And everybody expects it to be really bad and everybody understands how

important to this. Yeah. And we were doing no edits. We didn't have, you didn't have any apps to pull captions up. There was no translators. Nothing, man. But it didn't matter to me. What mattered to me, I remember, I think there was like, I don't know, I did a live once. It was, I was 54 years old, two years into social media. I think it was Periscope or Miracat. I don't know. You probably don't even remember those platforms. They don't exist anymore. And there was 16 people listening to me live. I was in a little condo. And I was, I went to my wife when it was over. I'm like, oh my God, dude, the world's about to change. And she's like, what's going on? I said, there's 16 people watching me.

16. And I was so excited, bro, because I knew 16 would become 32 and 32 would become 300. Let me just say this. A bad presentation is better than no presentation. Now, a lot of people will argue with me. I'd love to know in comments. Quantity or quality? Okay. I'm just telling you guys, Like for anybody listening right now, quantity is senior to quality. And by the way, you really have to have a strong ego, sense of self and self-esteem to put up poor quality. And I could put up more quality. Especially as you're older. As you're older, your ego becomes more fragile because now you can no longer say I'm the 16-year-old experimenting on YouTube.

Now you're the 52-year-old and it just becomes that much harder. Yeah. Yeah, I was doing an interview with somebody the other day and somebody clipped it and said, Grant Cardone doesn't know what a deed is. I'm like, yeah, dude, I really don't. I have $5 billion for the real estate. I don't really understand the difference between a deed and a title. Like, if you ask me right now, I think I know what they are, but like, I am not 100% certain.

So what? So I still have $5 billion for the real estate. I don't know which one's more important. The deed, what's the difference between a deed, a title, and $5 billion, a bunch? So I don't have to know everything, you know? Like, does that make me ignorant? Somebody's going to comment that you are. Hopefully, somebody's going to comment.

but I would rather somebody comment negatively. I had a bank hit me yesterday a week ago when Bitcoin was falling from, I think it fell from 96 down to 82 or something. I said, Bitcoin is crashing. I have to sell my plane. A bank called me, emailed me yesterday and said, hey, dude, are we all right over there? And I owed them some money.

And they saw the post on X. And I'm like, I got to call them this morning and say, bro, part troll, part truth. Okay. Grant Cardone is part troll and part truth. And that's how I use the internet. I drag the internet with a little bit of troll and a little bit of truth. And the internet gets all excited. You mentioned Jake Ball. I had him earlier on the podcast. We discussed this persona that he builds of being, you know, people hating him. Do you purposely do that? Or is it just a result of just being so bold and telling people take action? People are just, some people are polarized by that. Is this a

purposeful strategy? Most everything I do is not purposeful. I just kind of go with it, right? So, So, you know, things come to me. Like inspiration, I think God provides us with moments of inspiration. And there's a reason why they don't last. Inspiration does not last 30 minutes. Okay, like it might last a minute. It might last 30 seconds. So when I'm inspired, I take that as something from God to just do.

Go with it. Like most of my marketing is inspired. The Bitcoin crash. Bitcoin's crashing. I need to sell my, I'm going to sell my plane. I didn't say anything else. That's all I said. I showed a picture of my plane.

Bitcoin's crashing. I'm going to sell my plane. I didn't say I needed to sell my plane. I didn't say I was going to sell my plane so I could buy Bitcoin. I let the audience decide what that meant. And, you know, the audience has imagination and they get engaged by it. I'm curious. When you put up a post, Bitcoin, I need to sell my plane. Do you know right away before you even post it, this is gold? No, no, no clue. No clue. I'm not even attempting to do it. I was just inspired to say something. This morning I'm driving to work and I was inspired to do an Instagram live and I did it. Hey guys, any questions you want to answer. Again, this is just a humble, and I know people don't use the word humble with Grant Cardone, but I am actually fairly humble

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

It wasn't in my to-do list today. Speaking of Humble, you also used the word broken before. You were at 25, a recovering drug addict. I grew up on Section 8 housing. I was an immigrant. We've both gotten successful. You've obviously gotten much more. If you've been considering futures trading, now might be the time to take a closer look.

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Paid memberships with a connected payment account required. See Experian.com for details. But why do you think so many people are stuck in victim mode? Why can they not shake this victim status? Man, I don't know. I don't know. You know. I don't know.

I think society, David, is doing a good job of convincing people that victim is like some title. you're a victim, you have mental illness, you have ADD, you have bipolar, you're poor, blah, blah, blah. These are titles, by the way, you're a drug addict, you know, you come from an addictive, you got an addictive personality, blah, blah, blah, blah. All these things are labels. These are not who you are. There's no such thing as any of these things, by the way. Okay, I can take any drug addict right now, drop you off on an island, and you will be over your

addiction in 72 hours. You got a nicotine addiction? Oh, you can't kick it? Oh, yeah. I get tobacco out of your life. You will kick the, just put you in an environment where there's no nicotine, you'll be off of it. Okay, the bipolar, ADD, ADHD, these are all, these are labels, introvert, extrovert, too active, not active enough. It's all bullshit. Middle class, upper class, like, these are titles that are bullshit.

They have zero validation. There's no validation that anyone has depression. None, zero. You, the person that's depressed. has given themselves the authority to label themselves depressed. But if I go over there and light your house on fire right now, I guarantee you depression will not be what you're thinking about. Fear will be what you're thinking about.

And I'd rather be scared than depressed, by the way. So I'm just speaking for personal experience, and if this offense anybody, the psychiatrist and the psychologists in this country that have figured out a label, the big pharma companies that have figured out a label for every issue human beings have today from Restless Lake Syndrome to depression to ADD to ADHD. Hey, good for you guys, great marketing scheme.

I don't need any medication for any of that. I need a purpose. I need to be surrounded by people that are taking action. And I need to quit giving myself excuses. So you've raised capital from retail for real estate than anyone else in history. What do you attribute to that and what have been your lessons from raising from retail? Well, thank you for saying that, dude, because I'm not on any list. Like when they say, hey, who's rate?

Who is the most? I fact checked it. I looked it up with my team. We did. I mean, we have like when you put social media, people that have made money using social media, we raised over $2 billion and sold another $2 billion in products. This is a privately held company. This is not, you know, I'm not, and I, and I didn't take my clothes off to do it.

I have the CEO of I Capital, Lawrence Calcano. We talked about this $150 trillion that's going in from retail into the institutional market. And a lot of people are trying to crack retail. What have been your lessons? How did you crack retail when no one else has been able to do it at scale? Number one is I believed in the retail investor before other people did. And I believed in democratizing making my mom. When I grew up as a 15-year-old, I watched my mom never be, nobody helped her make money.

Nobody helped her with her investments. And I swore that one day I was going to grow up and help people if I was ever successful. And if I ever learned anything, I was going to figure out how to help the common person invest their money and make money. I wasn't able to do it for my mom. But so in 2010, when the crowd run crowdfunding rules changed, I think it was Barack Obama, the act of startup jobs act. Jobs Act. Was that 12, 2012? Somewhere around there.

When I saw what he did there, then we started crowdfunding. Institutional Quality Real Estate. It's a real asset. You can actually see the asset. And I would fund it with my money. And then I would go to my audience and say, hey, guys, I have this great opportunity. My family's completely invested in it.

And we set up a portal where you could go invest dollars and you could partner with me in this deal. We found it, I find it, fund it, put it on a site at the exact same price. Whatever it costs us to acquire that asset, our expenses are included. and then I say to my audience, if you want to come in, come in. We've had 20,000 investors raised almost $2 billion. Now, the way we did this, David, was we refused to go get the money from the banks. Now, this is why I think I've been successful is because the banks,

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

I'm not proud of that. I'm not bragging. I'm saying it's harder because you have to do the repetitive message. But if you can pull it off the way we have, we were early doing it before it was respected. Now everybody's trying to do it. Blackstone, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, they're all talking about how do I get to the retail investor. If you can pull it off, the money should be cheaper, it should be friendlier, and it should be longer. Meaning it's going to be, you're not going to have a, you're not going to have a gun to your head saying you have to, you have to, you have to have

pay the people back in three years because you want time. If you have a great business like we do in real estate, real estate wants time in order for it to reach us full maturity. So we have a 10-year fund with discretion to go another 10 years. We're in the process. We've done 47 deals, about $5.2 billion with a real estate. We've sent out almost a half a billion dollars in cash flow. And we're going to take our portfolio probably and tokenize each one of our funds going forward. So there'd be a secondary market for it as well. And we're going to fund that direct to my audience. You made a decision to add Bitcoin to the funds. Walk me through that. I've been buying real estate for almost 40 years now. And while real estate has been a very dependable investment over long

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

treat the clients better, et cetera. But there's only so many things everybody can do. At some point, you're just real estate. and your real estate's crossed for my real estate, and the rent's going to be about the same. So last year, and for 40 years now, we've been looking for ways to improve that. Well, I've been studying Bitcoin for quite a while now,

and last year we combined real estate and Bitcoin. So we took a piece of real estate, paid cash for the real estate, very, very conservative, no debt. It was a $72 million complex. The product should have sold for $88 million. We paid $72, and we filled it up with $16 million of Bitcoin.

So rather than just stealing the real estate, which I'm good at, that's what we do. We buy distressed properties below replacement costs. I've done 46 of those projects. What I tried to do was rather than just buying the distressed product, I just took the the distress portion, the gap. And rather than buying something invisible, a discount is a ghost. It's just cheaper. There's no real value in a discount.

We took the discount portion and filled it up with a product called Bitcoin that has volatility, it goes up and down, right? It can go, it could go all the way to zero, or it could go to 250,000 of Bitcoin or 500, or right now it's just going sideways. So we combine the two, put the two together. We've done five of these now. We have, we accumulated almost 2,000 Bitcoin yesterday. I was with World Liberty Financial, a bit Mar-a-Lago yesterday. It was about 300 of us. There was mostly bit bitcoinsers and tokenized companies coming into this space. We're basically creating a new company. Okay. It's going to be a really,

estate Bitcoin hybrid vehicle. And the reason we did it is because there's a, it's a way to improve returns to the real estate investor, to our investors. It's also a way to introduce our real estate investors, conservative investors that want cash flow to Bitcoin. And thirdly, and most importantly, it's the creation of a new financial vehicle that we believe is the first time in 65 years that real estate has been changed. So there's a little glitch in the real estate industry that's about 65 years old called REITs. You'll hear to them referred as REIT's Real Estate Investment Trust. They cannot hold any currency on their on their financial statement. They can never hold Bitcoin. They're trapped in a, you know, like a six to eight percent

return a year. When we combine the two real estate and Bitcoin, I now have a bit of a moat built around my company that 190 companies that control real estate in America at about four trillion dollars cannot compete with me. So we think we create a new, I literally believe that I'm going to, we're going to look back 60 years from now and say that 2025 was the year that the real estate Bitcoin hybrid was created and it's going to change the way people invest in real estate going forward. I have this term I coined the virtue of illiquidity and it came from my interviews with crypto investors. So if you think there's hundreds of millions, if not billions of crypto investors, there's a couple hundred, let's call it 500 or so that are fund managers.

I've interviewed the top desk, top 10%, and they all said in one variation or another, off the record, that the number one thing that determined their return is whether the capital was liquid or illiquid. So all the things that they were doing, all the research, all the, all the access, all of that paled in comparison with just not selling. Yeah. See, Wall Street wants to talk all you guys into liquidity, but liquidity is not what you want. You want illiquidity. Now, when there's an opportunity, you want liquidity. But really what I don't want, and the reason I love real estate and Bitcoin combined is because I take an ill-liquid asset, which is real estate. It's real. It's hard. It can't move. You can't steal it from me. You can't take it down. Like you cannot steal my real estate. It's impossible.

It's 330 units. $300 million. It takes up a whole block in Boka. It sits in front of a golf course. None of this is going to change. I see the ocean from every window. It's very physical. Then I combine it with something that's digital. I can't even find it in space or time. I can't. even locate it. It sits on something called the blockchain. You combine those two, bro. It's like a, like it's a physical and a tangible, a digital, one cash flows, one doesn't, one has a utility, one, I can't even put my hands around it, right? You combine the two together. I now have an ill-liquid asset. When you buy real estate, you don't sell it the next day. It would take six to nine months to sell this asset. I combine it with a very liquid asset that goes up and down like this, and I don't have to worry about it going up and down anymore.

I just need time. You know, imagine owning the Vatican or where, you know, right, the 16th chapel in the 1400s or whenever it was built, right, and what it's worked today, you want real estate for long periods of time. And if you believe Bitcoin's here to stay, you want Bitcoin 12 years from now. You don't really care about the next 12 days. You care about the next 12 years. I love Bitcoin.

I'm a Bitcoin bull. But isn't it dangerous to hold it in a real estate portfolio? and why is that not like adding a lot of risk and a lot of leverage? Well, I would just tell you, if you're just a bitcoiner, right, you wouldn't do my deal. You would just do the Bitcoin and you'd buy it at $68,000 or $66,000 today. You'd sit and wait for your one Bitcoin. But look, 99% of the world does not even know what Bitcoin is. If you said BTC, they'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about, dude.

Is that BTC or SDD? Like, I'm not sure what you're talking about. 99% of planet Earth does not know what Bitcoin is. They do not know Michael Saylor. They do not know what the white paper is. They do not know the book to Bitcoin standard. Period. In the story, they don't know what the word fungible means.

Okay? Like, they don't know. 99% of planet error understands real estate. We created a vehicle that is very understandable. Piece of real estate, the cash flows, physical location, 101 Meisner, Boca Raton. I bought it out of bankruptcy. $230 million. It should have sold for $3.50.

There was 14 other institutional investors. I closed the project in 10 days. Pay cash, $230 million. day clothes, bought it from Blackstone out of their debt fund. It was a distress asset. We stole it. You can Google it, 101 Meisner. Now, here comes the Bitcoin story. We added Bitcoin on top of it. The real estate investor now owns the real estate, the cash flow, gets the depreciation, and we added $100 million of Bitcoin. We added a thousand coins to that purchase, a thousand and $1,75 coins. You have the real estate that I can condo out of and pick up $200 million,

sell off the condos, the investors will make $200 million, and we still own $1,00075 Bitcoin. I have the best of two worlds. You end up with one Bitcoin. Okay, I end up with the real estate, the condo exit, the real estate exit, the cash flow, the depreciation, and the Bitcoin. If the Bitcoin skyrockets and I own $1,75, it purchase, and it goes to $1 million tomorrow, I could sell off my Bitcoin and make a billion $1 billion is what we would make. If that takes one year, two years, five years, or 12 years, I think it goes to $7 million one day.

I make a billion dollars on a real estate. Twelve years from now, I could profit my investors on the Bitcoin or borrow against the Bitcoin and I still own my real estate. So I don't have to make a decision on one or the other. Now, we won't do either one of those. We'll combine this. We're going to keep adding Bitcoin real estate hybrids, and we'll go to the public markets and see if the public markets give us the institutions, your buddies, if they're

going to give me a premium for combining 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 of these together. And we think they will. I think a lot of people underestimate behaviorally how to invest. So they think I'm going to buy one Bitcoin, I'm going to ride it up and down. And the data always shows most people have loose hands. They will sell. So you have to think about how do you create an anti-fragile portfolio? How do you construct your portfolio in such a way that you don't sell?

Yeah. And look, I think Bitcoin's going to outlast companies. Like I just, you know, my real estate, that piece of one 101 Meisner and Boca or anything you got to see at Cardone Capital, my entire portfolio will be around longer than Meta. It'll be around longer than Google. Could be around longer than Amazon. All companies get replaced at some point with technology. So I believe Bitcoin will be around longer than the U.S. dollar. Will the U.S. dollar go away this decade? 20 years from now, 30 years from now? No, I don't think so. I think it would be 50 years. But I believe the blockchain

will be there 100 years from now. I believe, I don't believe we go back to gold. I believe gold failed is a currency. Otherwise, we'd all be having, we'd have gold. I'd have gold coins in my pocket today, but dude, it failed. Okay. We went gold. We went paper. We went paper to treasury bills, treasury bills. The