Grant Cardone - The 10X Rule

Full transcript: Grant Cardone on London Real

6:01 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Grant Cardone, the New York Times best-selling author, sales training expert and motivational speaker on leadership, real estate investing, entrepreneurship and social media.

6:27 Originally from Louisiana, you started from nothing and now have five privately held companies with annual revenues exceeding $100 million. Last year Forbes magazine named you number one of the 25 marketing influencers to watch, and you’re the author of five books including “Sell or Be Sold,” “The 10X Rule” and “If You’re Not First, You’re Last.” Grant, welcome to… Thank you so much for having me. It’s awesome to have you here.

6:49 It’s great to be in this room, man. Hey, thank you very much. How is London treating you? In London… London’s treating us as well as we treat it, except for the casino, which, uh, I lost 500 pounds pretty quick.

7:00 But, um, it’s been great, man. We’ve been to Harrods and staying down in a nice, nice little spot, so the hotel’s nice, the people are great. I haven’t seen Harry yet, but I’ve been trying to find him on the streets. Yeah, I heard you, you’re pointing them out at Buckingham Palace and people went for it. Everybody did.

7:14 Oh yeah, I just started screaming at my car, “Harry! There’s Harry! Harry!” Siding, right? My driver just lost it.

7:20 And, uh, he’s getting married this weekend, right? Yeah. Okay, right. So you’re stirring it up a little bit. Your girls were on London Tower Bridge, right?

7:27 Tower Bridge. I called it London Bridge, but it was Tower Bridge. I, I don’t know where I am most the time. So yeah, I think when they sold the old London Bridge to the Americans in Arizona, they thought it was the Tower Bridge. Okay, that’s the pretty one.

7:38 Okay. Yeah. So you’re, you’re liking it here? We’re loving it. Well, I mean, the weather’s been spectacular, so it’s been great.

7:44 People are phenomenal. Really? Yeah, friendly. Yeah, maybe, maybe we’re friendly. Okay.

7:48 You know, and then they respond in kind. When you think of London, when you’re in Miami, like, what do you usually think about? British, European, is it a different mentality? Yeah, yeah. I think, I think conservative, polite, manners, proper, all the things that I’m basically not, you know, that, that I even wonder why will I fit in there, you know, will they, you know, will they accept who I am?

8:11 And, but, but I’ve had the same problem in where I live, like, like those things, those social, you know, expectations of not that I don’t have manners, but, but the social norms, like fitting into something, you know. My whole life I’ve struggled with fitting in, and so, you know, living there and coming here, this is just like manners on steroids here. Proper on steroids, right? Like you have to be proper, right? A gentleman.

8:41 And were you always that way, just open book when it comes to your feelings and telling people what you thought? I, I mean, look, look, my dad died when I was 10, so when you don’t have a father, a, a male image there to, like, you know, drop the belt, because my dad was an enforcer and, um, I think it changes things, you know. My mom, I remember after my dad died, my mom whipped me. She brought out the belt and it was a joke. It was like, this is hilarious.

9:06 Like, I’ll never be whipped again, right? So, um, you know, I was without direction and, and, and, um, you know, I missed that, that guy directing me and, be, being that mentor and, and, uh, that strong, you know. And then I had my mom just scared and trying to figure things out. So you got a 10-year-old kid, man. A twin brother, so I, I had a force.

9:30 We were a unit. We’re bored. School didn’t help because we’re bored. And you, you were born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a little small town. Yeah.

9:40 What, what is that like for people that have never been to Louisiana, that don’t know what, what it’s like down there? How would you explain it to, uh, Prince Harry? You know, what, what the culture like, what are the people? I’d say, “Harry, dude, like, I took a, a canoe, a little canoe down the bayous, you know, to go to school.” You know, and he took a carriage.

10:02 So, uh, no, it’s a little small town, you know. It’s, it’s hot, it’s, it’s humid, uh, mosquitoes, roaches, like, uh, I grew up low, you know, middle class. I mean, we had, we had a roof and we had air conditioning and we had heater and, and we had a car and we had bicycles, but we had fear. There was tremendous fear in the environment, constant fear, worry about… And this wasn’t for a cycle, this was for, you know, from the age of 10 to, like, when I left the house.

10:34 Okay, constant fear the whole time. Fear of economics, economic fear. Yeah, it’s all it was, all economics. The mechanic’s going to take care, take advantage of us, the plumber’s going to take advantage of us, the roofer, like anything. You didn’t want to spend money, everything was conservation.

10:49 It really has built who I am today because, uh, you know, that, the, my dad died in February, my mom sold the house by March. So we had this beautiful house. My dad had finally made it fully into the middle class, maybe even upper middle class. 18 months after he bought his house, his dream house, he died 15 days later. The house is sold because she couldn’t handle it.

11:14 So at 10 years old, I’m learning a house is a liability. I, I didn’t know this would play out later, right? But later on in my life I would realize, um, it would be another 20 years and I’d realized, oh, single-family home, the front door, just one door. House is not an asset, it’s a liability. Okay, I want to talk on that.

11:34 Is that, that money fear, economic kind of prison in your brains, is that endemic to Louisiana, the South, America, to all of America? Okay, living on the edge, paycheck to paycheck. I mean, America, America, you know, the movies act like Amer… all the Americans are rich and they’re all boisterous and they’re all secure. Completely not true, any more than all English people have manners. So, um, the Americans are…

12:04 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. 64% of Americans that have businesses break even or lose money. Uh, the, the land of the brave and the home of the free, that’s our American, uh, anthem. Um, it’s not even close to the truth. Most people don’t have any money, and if they have accepted the fact that they don’t have any money, they don’t have any leftover money, they’re fearful of money constantly, they overspend, they don’t know how to produce money, they definitely don’t know how to multiply it.

12:32 It might be a world condition because, you know what, everybody’s been telling me here is like, dude, you’re… I said, what country am I describing? Uh, right here. Yeah. Do you think the American kind of brashness comes from that underlying fear?

12:47 No, I think that comes from the movies. Most Americans are not brash. Okay. You know, I would be, I would be my persona, which is like who I, I, I’ve just figured out how to get away with it. Um, most Americans are not brash by any means.

13:05 Okay, so even you’re an outlier in Miami? Oh, no, without a doubt. Okay, tell me more about young Grant. So you’re ten, yeah, you know, your dad had just made it, I think at nine you’d bought the house, right? Yeah.

13:15 And then you died at ten. Yeah, yeah. The twin brother, who, I mean, I know you said you’ve always kind of, it was a way for you to look at yourself and you were like, wow, I see him with so much potential in him, and so it’s a way that you kind of have to look at yourself. Yeah. And tell me about that young kid.

13:30 Uh, you know, just again, like my mom had her hands full, you know. She didn’t talk about money being a problem, but we could see, I could see that she was scared. She’s clipping coupons. It’s the culture. Right, you’re being boiled, you’re being made ready in a soup.

13:46 The culture is the soup and you’re being cooked in the soup, and that’s where we’re collecting our data from. And, uh, so that the information was, you know, save your money. Penny saved is, you know, penny earned, and, and everything’s preservation and conservation and, and, you know, protection and conservation, and which is, yes, because it’s passive. Well, totally, totally. You’re just becoming a victim, you’re becoming a… you’re sitting back, you’re your effect of everything.

14:17 So there was… but my mama did… she didn’t know any better, right? She was a… she was uneducated. She had never held a job, she, she did not have an entrepreneurial spirit, like she doesn’t… she didn’t know. At that time women really weren’t encouraged to go out and earn money, so they were mothers, were doing at that time in the 50s what they did: they raising kids and being a wife, right, and taking care of the house, which, by the way, it’s a extremely important role and probably something that we’re short on.

14:48 Yeah, yeah. Um, but, but she was doing… she was giving me three meals a day, and with every meal came a lecture, you know. So, um, she was just doing the best she could do. I, on the other hand, at 10 years old wanted to be a man. 12, I wanted to be an adult.

15:03 I wanted to be an adult since I was six, when I saw that whoever had the money decided where we went. I wanted money. I didn’t want money because, I, because of money, I wanted money because, who it appeared to me that whoever had the money had control of the environment. And I knew that way before my dad died. I would watch him and another man, a doctor in the neighborhood, and they seemed to have fun.

15:25 Whoever had the money seemed to, like, control where we went, how long we went, what we did. And the kid, the kid, if you, if you have kids… You, how many you have? I got two young boys and then a stepdaughter. In her…

15:37 Yeah, they’re picking up everything. Oh, yeah, it’s like a hard drive that just opens when they are born, you know. Exactly, you know, and, and they’re open to learning and, and, um, you know, I can watch my kids, they’ll play on a phone, they could watch a TV show and know exactly what me and what Elena and I are talking about in our other room and collect all the data perfectly. But when you take an adult and put them in that setting, and they’re like, hey, wait a minute, I can’t, I got to pay attention to this.

16:03 But the kid doesn’t do that. The kid’s like, I can consume here, I can consume off the game and I can pick up your, your conversation and duplicate almost all of it perfectly. Okay. And so what is it… and I was doing the same thing. Okay, all right, I’m picking up everything from my brother, my older brother, my twin brother, my mom, TV, John Kennedy gets killed, I mean, I’m picking up data everywhere.

16:25 My, my dad dies, I’m picking up all the data, right, and, and that’s what makes that, that’s what, like, starts forming the character of the individual. My dad wanted to be rich. He never said that to me, but later I would find out my dad wanted to be a wealthy man and he didn’t get there. He got… he did, he fulfilled his obligate… personal obligation as a man to take care of his family and his wife and his kids and be a good example to his parents. He didn’t get the freedom part, you know, which he really wanted, and I think some of that might have been left in the environment for me to grab.

17:03 Is that why you’re doing what you’re doing now? I don’t, I don’t think that’s why I’m doing it, but, but certainly that was a, it was an inspiration to, okay, to kind of get there where he wanted to go. Maybe, maybe, maybe, you know, my brother’s got it. Okay, in a different way though. My brother and I do money completely different.

17:21 He’s much more free-willy with it and I’m much more, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna turn this into something and not take as many risks. But I had two sisters and an older brother in the environment. My older brother died when he was very young. My two older sisters, they didn’t get it as much in the same environment, so you can’t just say it’s an environmental thing. Talk to me about the teenage Grant.

17:41 Yeah, you’re doing lemonade stands and paper… No, I’m doing drugs, it’s what I’m doing. 15, uh, 16 years old, I smoke weed for the first time. Louisiana, you’re not doing lemonade stands, man. It’s a great conversation.

17:54 Selling baseball cards and selling flowers and… but that’s not what we were doing. We were in Louisiana, we’re shooting guns. Anything that moves, we shoot it, you know. I, I have a rifle, .22 caliber rifle at 12 years old. We’re wild, man.

18:10 While kids, we’re having mud wars in the lake and kumquat battles with the neighbors and smashing eggplants into cars. Like, we’re bored. Like, we, we have the worst problem in society: boredom. And what problem today? Oh, for everybody, not just me.

18:31 Okay, but this is my projection on all of mankind, but yeah, when people are bored they become problematic. Okay, and you times 10. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, definitely, definitely. Okay, and so we smoked some weed at 16. Yeah.

18:44 And that’s the start of a road. Yeah. Why do you think that was so attractive to you? It wasn’t unattractive. Okay, no, it was…

18:53 I knew when I picked it up, I’m like, this, this is terrible. Doing this, I don’t know why I’m doing this, I know I’m going to regret doing this, but, you know, my brother was doing it, Brian, my buddy was doing it, I wanted in. Peer pressure was very powerful. Um, you know, how do you go it alone here? So smoked weed, next day I smoked it again, next thing you know I’m like full into drugs.

19:17 And no, but nobody, nobody starts using drugs thinking, “I’m gonna be a drug addict.” But within probably two years I was doing drugs every day. Okay, not just weed, other stuff, anything. Okay, this is before the whole pill crisis down south, so it wasn’t necessarily that. No, no, no, this was way before the, the opiate…

19:34 Right, no, no, because that would have been really dangerous. Yeah, okay, but this was dangerous enough. Okay, so why? Because, because, I mean, I became a full-fledged, like, drug addict and, um, I’m smoking, I’m smoking, popping pills, any drug. There was no, like, everybody…

19:54 What’s your drug of choice? Did, like, any drug, alcohol, alcohol, anything that would, anything that would change my attitude or fill up the boredom. Is it boredom or just maybe the negativity and fear and uncertainty of the area or you have your life, like… Yeah, sure, all that, you know, like, like, you know, the, the rehab I went to said that you have a disease. You know, I don’t know, I don’t believe that today, that some people have a disease.

20:18 There’s no test for the disease anyway. Like, there’s diseases now for everything that they have no test for, so I don’t think it’s a disease or I was somehow picked to be a drug addict or I have some DNA to be an entrepreneur. Me and Gary V had this conversation. He thinks, he thinks entrepreneurs have some DNA. I said, that’s, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

20:39 That means some people can’t be entrepreneurs, which is not true. No, you do drugs enough, it won’t matter what your DNA is. You do anything enough, you go into a casino enough times and play enough times, you’ll become addicted, like, just like a game, like you play a game enough times, enough level is a Candy Crush, and you’ll want to, you’ll want to get to the next level. So, and that’s what happened with drugs. It was 15 years old to 25, for 10 years, some nine and a half years, I use drugs almost every day.

21:09 It’s heavy. Yeah, it was terrible, man, it was terrible. The drug, the drugs are one thing, but the degraded… The degradedness of the individual, it chips away at your self-esteem little by little by little, right, and then by chunks, and then by big, big blocks. So by the time I’m 20, by the time I’m 19, I was, like, I was as close to zero as a person can get, like, and I’ll go lower than that before it’s over.

21:33 Okay. And yeah, you said that you thought your low was much higher than it really was. Yeah, yeah. You thought you’d rock bottom. There’s a lot, there’s a lot of rock bottoms.

21:40 Okay, you know, five meg Grant then, like, what would he be like? No eye contact, just real, not even there. I weigh 170 pounds today, I weighed 130 pounds in… Gray, very gray. Um, my nose is damaged from the inside.

21:56 Uh, you know, like, it was, it was ugly, dude, it was bad. Okay, and when you’re 20 your older brother dies. Yeah, when I was 20, yeah. And you, you meant… you did the research, you know, I like to know what’s going on. So yeah, so that doesn’t help anything, right?

22:08 Well, my dad died when I was 10. Yeah, so, like, oh, I’m thinking, man, life is short here. Um, my brother dies 10 years later. I talked to him the night before, on a Sunday night. I talked to him, Monday morning he was dead.

22:25 So that gets reinforced, you know, and John Kennedy died in between. No, no, he died before my dad. So all these messages you’re getting, punched, like, even John Kennedy’s death, right, it’s a big deal, right? I don’t think people understand it’s… five years old, man, I’m five years old. I’m in a house, I don’t even know what I’m watching, I just know that there’s grief in my house, on TV, like there was grief in the entire nation, probably in the whole world.

22:50 You, you feel this event happening. Yeah, you know, and, and the… there are these events that happen that, that shift people’s… That they’re so powerful and so big, and I’m starting to have these and they’re being re-stimulated as time goes on, right? They’re being, they’re, they’re mounting on top of one another and they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re punching in a message which, which, by the way, there’s a… there’s some goodness that comes out of that because the time is now.

23:17 Yeah, exactly. Time is now, be in a hurry. And also, did, if you punch on anything long enough, you could actually change things. Like, my life is about punching. I’m a puncher.

23:27 Like, I punch a lot, I punch hard, and but mostly I punch persistently, kind of like life did to me. Like, I’ve learned to punch back. It’s like banging your head against the wall until the wall breaks. Yeah, the wall breaks, the wall will break. Yeah, your head will get bloody.

23:42 Yeah. The wife, the woman I’m married to, she’s like… she just broke, she’s just finally like, okay, maybe you’re a good dude. 13 months later. Yeah, yeah, he said yes. Um, so just back to that piece.

23:52 So, and then the downside of having all that death reminder in your life is that maybe I just want to take this pain away and get into the drugs, take away, get away from the world. I, I don’t know, I don’t think it was pain driven, like, oh, you know, that’s what they don’t… you know, oh, you lost your dad, your dad abandoned you, you know, I’ve had all the therapy around all that. I don’t think… I think those guys are just a little bit off. Okay, from, um, I did not have to go down that path to find who I am.

24:20 That guy was always there. You know, the guy I am today was always there. You could not kill him with drugs. And, and, you know, now coming out of the treatment center, they tried to get rid of that guy. That guy is the guy, you know, the guy, the obsessed guy, the, the, you know, the guy that can throw himself all into something, the drug addict.

24:46 Yeah, do you want that guy? You want that guy because that’s the guy that makes things happen. That guy is relentless. You want that, you want that, but rehab wants to get rid of that guy. They want to keep you out here.

24:56 They think that guy’s the problem. That guy’s not the problem. The drugs were the problem. Okay, okay, the lack of self-esteem was the problem, the, the boredom was the problem. Dude, I’ll talk about boredom, like, boredom is the drug you need to avoid, because that’s where people start making bad choices.

25:14 Typically they don’t become a drug addict, they become a consumer of garbage. They waste time, they consume excuses, you know. So that happened here, I see that here a lot. Okay, in this city? Yeah, in this country.

25:30 Oh, in this country. Okay, yeah. Uh, what was the rock bottom that got you into that rehab? My mom. It wasn’t the drugs, it wasn’t…

25:36 I was beat up, I had 70 stitches put in my head and face with a, with a guy beat, pistol-whipped me. What was that? Why was that happening? You talked about that incident before, because I, I told another dude, this guy said something to me and I said something to him and he sent a boy you know to teach me a lesson, Louisiana style. Yeah, yeah.

25:56 Okay, with the gun in it. Yeah, yeah. Because you still got scars from that? Oh yeah, totally. Here, here, above both of my eyes, underneath the eyes, over my mouth, and, um, you know, they, they wanted to disfigure me.

26:07 Just imagine how handsome I would have been just without that. Did that event help you? No, no, no, that just beat up the self-esteem even more. Okay, it, like, it degraded me another level, because now, like, you can’t even stand up for yourself, dude, you won’t even fight back, which I did, but that just, you know, the guy was a lot bigger than me, so, um, now I’m in a space where there’s criminals and gangsters and real physical harm. I don’t know how to get out of this space and I don’t know how to play by those rules because I’m not that guy.

26:43 I’m not the guy that will beat up somebody, you know. I’ll, I’ll, you know, I’ll do what I can to protect myself, but I won’t play that level. So now I’m in a terrible place because I can’t win in this space. So I’m 23, I’m in the hospital, I’m gonna quit drugs now. I was doing drugs before the day was over.

27:03 I couldn’t stop, man. Yeah, so two years would go by, I continued my behavior. You would think this would be the one, right? And, um, my mom, you know, my mom had this little business going on, she was trying to run this little business, and I walked in, I was all sloppy loaded, and she’s like, I’m done. Don’t come here anymore.

27:24 You’re not welcomed here anymore. This might be the last time we see each other. And I was in a treatment center 30, 30 days later. Yeah, it’s the most powerful things, relationships, right? Yeah, man, tough love.

27:36 My mom said, hey, that was it. She had enough nonsense. Okay, and you knew she meant it. So look, I was disgusted. I needed something, I need…

27:43 I needed one more thing to just, like, okay, one way or the other, that was dying. I’ve been dying for nine years. My mom just turned her… she turned her eye to it. She, she didn’t want to… she didn’t want to confront it. If you’re the mother of a drug addict, you know, you know before he knows.

28:02 Yeah, yeah. I’d… so I’m doing this whole Iron Man race and, and I came open about my own, um, heroin overdose. No, no, no. Uh-huh. So I know what you’re talking about, you know, and everyone knows it around you.

28:12 Yeah, and the only thing that made me hit rock bottom was that everyone abandoned me, and, um, I went and saw a bunch of them in New York recently, the first time in 16 years, and I’m like, thank you, because if you hadn’t have told me… Yeah, they basically say f*** you. Yeah, by getting out of your life. Yeah, yeah, and it shows you that it’s no longer accessible, acceptable. Yeah, yeah, and that’s the only thing that would make me…

28:33 When your drug dealer tells you you have a problem, you know… Yeah, well, that’s a problem too, but, like, you know, waking up in a hospital almost dead doesn’t do it. Yeah, yeah, something else is a trigger. And so rehab did teach you some things? And, dude, I wanted to recover, it’s not like I did…

28:47 I didn’t want to do it. I had tried to quit, you, you know the deal, at least 10 times a day. I quit drugs for nine years. Today I’m gonna quit, five minutes later I’m using, and then I’d say, okay, I’m gonna quit, that’s it, I’m done. I’m not gonna throw it away yet, but I’m done.

29:05 And then an hour and a half later, dude, I’m doing drugs again. So every day, it’s not just the drugs, it’s not just what you’re doing to your body, it’s like the number of times I quit and couldn’t quit, right, and then started again, like, you know, it’s just like you start, like, losing any sense of self-respect. Yeah. And so how do you get that back? You go to rehab.

29:29 I go to rehab. And they teach you about maybe how to mentally deal with staying away from the drugs. Not really. Not right, man. I wonder if the treatment centers aren’t just, you know, just adding to the problem.

29:42 How so? Well, I mean, I know, I know the intention’s good, but most of them today are producing a different kind of drug addict, you know. They’re going, I’m, I’m going in on some, you know, one drug and coming out on fianna barber. But I mean, they got… they gave me drugs while I was there. Okay.

30:04 They said, don’t not take these, you need this drug, you are a drug addict, you will never recover. It is a disease, you have it, you cannot recover from it no matter what. Uh, give up all your ideas, you know, the whole inventory thing. You do the inventory and, and you told them no, you’re wrong. Yeah, he’s like, man, give up.

30:25 He’s like, you’ll never make it. He’s like, your chance of making it… I said, oh really? Why am I going to fail? He’s like… and I had 28 days.

30:31 Now I’m like, f*** dude, I just quit drink… using drugs for 28 days. Really all I needed, right, I needed to know I could not… I could go some period of time without using drugs. So he, uh, that was it. No relapse after that?

30:42 There’s never been a relapse. It’s crazy. So he said, he said, uh, if you do, if you hold on to these ideas of the books and being a… being famous and getting rich and all the stuff that I told them was underneath all this that I’ve been covering up, right, uh, you’ll never make it. Be satisfied. I, I can’t, you know, I just… it’s the echo in my mind of him saying, be satisfied with one thing.

31:09 Don’t use drugs one day at a time. If that’s all you get out of life, I’m like, f*** this, dude. Dude, that will not be what I’m known for. Yeah. And I went to meetings after that and I kept hearing that, but I kept hearing it from people that were, that didn’t recover more than just the drug addiction or the alcoholism.

31:27 The rest of their life never recovered because they’re playing kind of small and safe and scared because every day they’re playing with the, just, just be sober, just don’t use, right? And, and, and I don’t think I was made to just anything. Yeah, yeah. I, I, I never been to an A.A. meeting and I know they do a lot of great things for people, but it always seems in a weird way that you’re kind of getting up there and saying, I’m always this addict, I have this disease and I’m just a win today because I got up here and didn’t drink.

31:56 Yeah, but it’s like, wait a second, a win today would be if you went and f***ing crushed it. Yeah, exactly. And so, but then they, they want to hold you back because they think that’s addiction manifested or that’s going to bring you back. Yeah, dude, I was even told, well, you know, because I came back and I started working, I just threw my addiction into work. I needed something to throw into, right?

32:15 So I said, okay, I have to stay busy. Time is my enemy, time is my problem. When there’s too much time, Grant goes to freaking nuts. And, and, yeah, your OCD and your ADD and your ADHD and your… I’m like, yeah, where’s the test on this s***?

32:32 Like, I can measure certain things. The stuff you guys are talking about, I know how tall I am. I, all this other stuff you guys are talking sounds like it’s made up to me. Objective, it’s also inconclusive. So, so if you are… so what, you still need a plan, like, like, like, what, how about we take some blind tests and see how many different people, like, the books are about that thick.

32:52 Okay, who does it benefit to label me? Drug companies, totally. Like, who, who’s on the other end of this? Remember, I came out of that treatment center with, with a bottle of pills that they told me I would be on for the rest of my life. I was on them for a day, threw them away.

33:08 Now I’m really getting sober because now I don’t have any of this in me. Now I get to start making my own decisions, right? So I threw myself completely into my work. I had a job that I hated, threw myself into it completely. Now my sponsor, who, I had a sponsor that was good, that was very helpful and very limiting, right?

33:24 Your mentor can help you and limit you. They hold you on the leash and that, be careful, like, who’s your mentor? Everybody’s got one, by the way. Most people have too many. It’s not like… no, everybody’s got one or many, and so mentors can be a problem as, as much as a lift.

33:40 Okay, and so, uh, he says, you’ve just replaced one addiction for another one. I’m like, s***, was… does that make you a genius? Like, of course I have, dude. I gotta replace this free time with something. I was using drugs 10 hours a day.

33:53 I better… I have to replace it with some energy, right? I don’t want to just go into a void. Well, he was doing three meetings today, and I’m like, I’m not… I can’t do three meetings, dude.

34:04 I need to be a productive member of society. I, I have potential. Had you been productive before? Yeah, I remember being productive. When you asked that question, with my dad, I remember being productive with my dad.

34:15 I was nine years old, my dad taught me how to work. He never talked about work, but the way he went to work. And then we were in the yard one day and we were stuffing… Uh, we were picking up leaves and, and branches and pecans and I would watch my dad. He, he was like, to me as a nine-year-old, he looked like an artist.

34:36 He was, he was coordinated, I wasn’t. He was fast, I was slow. He was clean, I was sloppy, right? It’s like watching him, watching a great cook in the kitchen. It’s like, you know, it’s just fluid.

34:49 She doesn’t read, she doesn’t have checks, she doesn’t slow down, everything’s kept pretty clean, and then there’s me and they’re just… it’ll taste similar, but there’s gonna be a f***ing mess in this place. So he inspired you to that? I could see that there was potential and a beauty in it, and there was beauty in work. I’ve always loved work, whether it was outside or inside or… Not just because it keeps you busy, because there’s some beauty in it, there’s a mastery in it.

35:16 I think that their work is a, a, a gift from God. Speak on that. Yes, most people think it’s a chore. Yeah, I, I when I hear people talk about the job, I’ve seen The Four-Hour Work Week and the, the, the, the, you know, the idea that you won’t work for anyone, that you can’t have a job, it just kills you. You don’t like the Four-Hour Worker concept because it tries to engineer you out of doing something.

35:37 It’s disgusting to me. Explain. It is, like, it’s disgusting that anybody would want to outsource everything. Uh, that, that… I got 168 hours in a week.

35:53 I think that’s what it is. I don’t know exactly what the number is, but, um, dude, I want to use them all, man. And you want to get your hands dirty and do things that don’t scale. And totally. I want to do things you don’t want to do.

36:05 Absolutely. I, I want to do things I don’t want to do. I hear, I hear guys say, I don’t do stuff I don’t want to do. B******t, do… Who are you, like, who’s taking care of you then?

36:16 How arrogant that you wouldn’t do something you don’t want to do. And nobody’s successful does things they only do. I do s*** I want to do, I don’t want to do every day. We drove over here 45 minutes. I don’t want to f***ing sit in the back, I don’t care how nice the car is.

36:30 Who wants to sit in traffic for 45 minutes? I do stuff constantly I don’t want to do. It doesn’t matter what I want to do. You know what’s my purpose, what’s my potential, and am I willing to work toward that? So an idea that I would work four hours?

36:45 No, well, that’s just not real for me. Like, I would not read the book if you told me, hey man, I got this opportunity for you to work part-time, I have zero interest. I want to be great at what I’m doing and I know, I know without reading any book, I have to dedicate time and energy, effort, and I have to hit… I have to be frequent. You know, I can’t…

37:08 I’ve never gotten good at anything. Everything’s taken… it’s been a lot of work for me. So everything for me, whether I’m that little uncoordinated kid, it’s taken a lot, you know. It’s taken me 30 years to find any kind of success or any sense of, okay, I’m starting to find myself. You know, probably two or three thousand speaking engagements before I felt like I was comfortable on stage.

37:35 Um, three businesses that were freaking jamming before I said, you know, you might be a bit… you might actually be a legitimate businessman. You know, now, now we’re at seven businesses, we’ll do probably 150 million bucks this year. I’ve got… I’ll hit a billion dollars in real estate probably before the year is over. I’m just starting to feel like, you know what, maybe, maybe I’m gonna make it, you know.

37:59 By going into all the things you felt insecure at, the things you were not good at, the things you didn’t even like to do, dude, that’s been your modus operandi for the last 30 years. Totally. So, like, sales, you know, hated sales. People would be shocked to hear you say that. Hated it.

38:14 Five. I was in five sales jobs. Was a disaster at all of them. Hated, absolutely hated it. Um, you’re the master of sales.

38:24 I, I am. I embrace the things I hate. Why, why were you bad at it? Why did you hate it? I didn’t know.

38:29 Well, I was bad at it because nobody teaches anybody how to be good at sales, you know. So I didn’t know how to communicate to people, I didn’t know how to shake your hand, didn’t know how to build rapport. I’m, I’m honest enough that I’m not gonna lie to people, so the stuff I was being taught to do I didn’t like. You know, they ask a question, you ask them a question. Slimy, dude.

38:54 You know, I have enough integrity and ethics that when you tell me, okay, we’re not manipulating, but don’t answer their question, I’m like, well, dude, that’s just… that is manipulation. And that’s why I think a lot of people don’t like sales, because of what’s been taught for 100 years. The blueprint’s outdated. You got there, it was not… it was always wrong. Okay, it was wrong, and it’s why I believe it’s why salespeople have so, such a high turnover, why so few people want to be called salespeople.

39:26 I mean, you go through Harrods down there, you can’t find a salesperson in the whole joint. You think salespeople are ostracized in America? Oh, dude, it’s terrible here. I mean, really, we’ve had books, where “Sell or Be Sold,” we had to change some of the language in the book for it to be in bookshelves here. So, like, the word “pressure” can’t be in there, “persistence” can’t be in there.

39:48 Like, there’s things, you get laws you guys actually have here that, like… Go to Europe, it gets one step worse, you know, because it’s, as a whole, I’m ashamed of money and I don’t want to talk… You know, we could talk about that too, but so the sales blooper you get in, they give it to you, it’s not working for you, it doesn’t make sense for you, and you’re like, I gotta, I got to make my own. Well, what happened was, was I was in a sales job. I, I, I got to college, to…

40:10 I got a college degree in accounting. And because you thought it would teach you about money and it didn’t. Yeah, so, so I, I end up in the sales job, it’s the only job I can get, and so I hate it, right? So I’ll go to the treatment center, I come back out of the treatment center, I threw myself into it because it’s the only thing I had. I, I still had so little self-esteem that there was no way I was going to go try to get another job.

40:31 Yeah, right. And I was terrified of using drugs again, so I’m like, I went back, the, the place where I was working, they took me back, and I just, I threw myself into it. And it’s interesting, when you commit to something, little gifts just start automatically showing up. It’s a phenomenal thing. It’s happened my whole career.

40:48 When I fully commit, somebody will bring me something and there’s resistance along the way, in problems a long way, but if you get through those things, dude, if you just, like, like, super commit. Okay, and then look, then keep your eyes open, and by the way, the package may come wrapped in a package you don’t… you, you, you weren’t thinking about. Hard work, or like a voice or like a person or a, you know, maybe from a different direction than you thought, or an offering where you’re like, you read something about this and that’s not the thing.

41:22 Like, all throughout my career it’s come in weird kind of ways, and so, um, like, if you ask for help and, and somebody shows up at the door, maybe let… invite them in, regardless of what the packaging is or what you’ve heard about it or whatever. That’s really been beneficial to me. Okay, open mind, keep your ears open, but not too open. Okay, because you don’t want everybody’s advice, so you’ll be mediocre again. You’ll, you’ll be your individuality.

41:51 Yeah, you, you won’t even know what to do if you listen to me and Dave Ramsey, you won’t know whether to get debt or, or avoid it, and you won’t do anything, but you’ll be very knowledgeable, right? So, so I threw my… a guy walks up, he gives me a… it was a little cassette tape. He’s like, hey, I heard this, I thought you might like it. I listened to it, I was like, oh my God, there’s a way to sell stuff. I didn’t know there was actually something you could do.

42:17 I listened to it, I called the 800 number, I said, what else do you have? And the guy said, we got a program for three thousand dollars. It’s 25 years ago, so it’s like 10 grand, right? So I don’t… I said, I’ll call you back.

42:29 Call my mom, I said, I need to borrow three grand. First money I ever bought outside of college. She gave me the three grand and, um, changed my career. Wow. And then when I listened to this guy and then I got these, this set of tapes and I’d watch it, um, on, on sales and how to be a sales… how to negotiate.

42:46 I’m like, this is what I’m gonna end up doing for a living, I’m gonna teach people how to do this, because there was such a vacancy in a void of it years ago. But what happened was, what I didn’t like was some of the trickery in it. What I did was went in over the years and removed the trickery and basically made transparency and the authenticity in sales the way to service people, and now that’s become a hundred million dollar business for me, but it’s still a dirty word for a lot of people.

43:14 Will that change over time? Uh, it might. The, the, the whole space might disappear first, actually, because of the internet. Really? Because everything will be custom and tailored and everything’s just order it.

43:27 Really, you know, order, order online. Sales can’t die. Well, human opinions always need to be changed and challenged. I don’t think, I don’t think it dies, like, like, you know, the, the strategy of negotiating with people, like I do big deals today, like, you know, I, I used to think a 20,000 deal was a big deal, but I’m working on 200 million deals today, so those deals are probably not going to be done over the internet. They’re, they’re complicated, they require personalities and people and, and, and anytime you involve people, then you have insecurities and people have superiors to please and then you’ve got egos on the line and it’s the same thing at every level, which is good though.

44:16 That’s an opportunity for you. That’s an opportunity. Okay, but you’re… So at that level, like, if you’re going to negotiate your own deal, LeBron negotiates his own deals. You better know how to sell or you better, better just walk away.

44:29 The ultimate is just walk away, somebody else offers something else. But most people don’t have that kind of marketability, right? So it’s the everyday guy. I think some of the sales that will go away are the retail stores, like that kind of selling. Okay, gotcha.

44:41 Where it used to just be the human touch point. You’re okay, I think he’s gonna depend now on a click. Okay, you’re still gonna touch somebody and they’re gonna convince you this is the thing to buy or whatever, but some of that’s going to go away, but you’re still going to… the most important things in your life, you’re still going to want to negotiate, find the right person, negotiate, like your job, you know, our opportunity. I got guys that work for me that are 33 years old, make a million dollars a year.

45:04 They negotiated the right deal for them, found the right guy. Negotiating isn’t always about buying this piece of furniture, right? They negotiated with themselves as well as the marketplace and found a deal that made everybody win. Five years it took you to get out of rehab and make your first million. Did you get all your self-esteem back?

45:25 Because I know that takes time, from personal experience, I know it takes years. No, no, money, money, many… money in many situations can actually, um, increase the sensitivity to the lack of self. So, because, you know, you would think… First of all, I was so busy working, by the time I was 33, I think I had 31 or 32, something, somewhere in there, one day I looked up, I’m like, oh wow, I got a million dollars. You don’t make… nobody makes a million dollars, right?

46:00 You accumulate. Yeah, if you’re shooting for a million you won’t get there, right? You accumulate. One day you’re like, oh, I got a million dollars in a bank account, that’s what makes a millionaire. Everybody’s gonna pick up… everybody’s gonna make a million dollars.

46:11 You make 50 grand a year for 20 years, you made a million dollars. You know, but accumulating a million dollars, now I got a million dollars, I’m like, damn, this is nothing. Which is, like, terrifying. There’s a line in Wall Street where Bud Fox says, I never knew how poor I was until I started making a little bit of money. Exactly, exactly.

46:28 I remember I made one year, I made 650 grand. The guy looked at me, I was telling somebody, I said, I made 600 grand this year, and he’s like, how do you live on that? Excuse me? He said, how do you live on that? How do you make sense of your, like, potential at that?

46:46 And are you bragging or complaining? He’s like, I’m confused. And I’m like, f***, thank you so much, see you later, I got to get back to work, because it was a wake-up call, man. I’m like, oh wow, what’s available out there? Is that a real estate guy?

47:01 Uh, that guy was actually not, he was a, he was a, he was a New York Wall Street banker guy. You said you might have gone into Wall Street if you had to do it all over? It… without a doubt. Okay. Yeah, I would definitely do, like, a hedge fund or…

47:15 You know, because it scales and there’s tons of opportunity and there’s things happening there. Yeah, okay. But you went five years into sales and perfecting these techniques and you got into real estate because you wanted a place to put your cash and put your insurance, right? Yeah, so, so the, the first business was, uh, the first business was me going out talking to companies. I was cold calling them, businesses around America in the major cities, saying, hey, I have another way to sell things.

47:41 I want to show it to you. I want to… I just want to try it out with your staff and see what happens. And that, are you good on the phone now? Are you getting pretty…

47:49 I’m doing, I’m doing it on the phone. And you’re pretty good? I’m saying I’m gonna be in town, I’m coming to town. Okay, and they don’t know who I am. I have no name, I hadn’t written any books, I have no creds, nothing.

47:58 Okay, hey, my name’s Grant, I’m coming to town, I’d like to meet you, I’d like to show you something. I’m not interested. Click. I’d still go see the guy. So I started building that.

48:06 That’s when I really became a sales person. I’m 31, 31 to 33 years old and I’m banging the phone three days and then I show up in a city. Okay, that’s what makes a sales person because it’s cold calling and then showing up. It’s a cold call followed up by a visit. Hey, I was…

48:20 I called you the other day, you told me not to come by, appreciate what you said, I just want to introduce myself and the reason I’m in town. And then I’d go into my pitch and I’m like, I’m going to have an event here two weeks from now. I’m not interested. I know, you’re niners. How could you be?

48:33 You don’t have enough information to be interested. Like, that’s where I learned to sell. Okay, it wasn’t the five years before that. Okay, like now, now I’m learning how to produce a lead, how to create interest, you know, how to keep interest, how to persist in a cycle, how to hit a deadline, because every one of these events was two weeks later, right? So you need a deadline.

48:56 I’m front lg, absolutely. I need a tight deadline. You know, we were talking about the webinars earlier before the, the interview, and, and so every… I learned how to do everything in very tight timelines where most people take… We just did an event, uh, 20,200 people showed up.

49:11 We marketed the entire event for 77 days from start, from idea to close of an event with 77 days. Nobody does that. Most people take a year to do that event. Okay, so we did a 9,000 person event in under 9 months. Nobody hits these kind of targets.

49:26 So what I was learning, what I didn’t know back at 30 years old, was I was learning about the value of time, man, and, and pressure, and that had become literally like what has made my little thing here, or things, whether it’s real estate or… I’m off track from your question, bro. This is good, but the value of time, meaning compression of time, can get much more in there than you think. Oh my God, like, I get more done in a day than anybody I know. All right, and by doing that you’re even much more effective.

49:55 Well, yeah, I mean, sales is more effective and you’re just compressing everything. Yeah, I’m… time is money, right? If time is money and I’m compressing things, so God told me, he’s like, I said, he said, I said, who, who do you think works hard, me or you? He’s like, oh, he, he does. He’s convinced he works, he works harder than any person in the world.

50:13 It’s Gary Vee. Yeah, yeah, yeah, me. I said, yeah, but good, but who gets more done, dude? Who monetizes more, faster? These are the bigger questions, not who works harder.

50:24 It’s who puts the branches and the pecans and the leaves in the bag without making the biggest mess. Like that, that is what a business is. It’s not about making a mess or doing a bunch of work or looking all raggedy-ass at the end of the day. It’s how much can you get done with time, right? And so, and that’s a meme gone wrong on social media: I hustle, hustle, work all the time, work all the time.

50:45 It just means you’re out there making a bunch of motions. Like, I don’t want to hustle, I want… I want to prosper. I don’t want to grind, I want to create a machine that monetizes. You know, I’m not shameful of money, I want money, I want a lot of money.

51:00 I want to give money away, I want to raise a lot of money, and you can’t do that if you’re broke. So poor people are selfish. They definitely… explain that. Poor people, you know, look, poor people are extremely selfish people. And the concept here is you’re thinking about yourself all the time, what you don’t have, what you need, your clothing, your shelter, your excuses, your problems, and I say that with no sympathy because sympathy’s not gonna… it’s not gonna feed you.

51:36 Okay, the, the poor people, and people, by the way, that just get by are poor. So really the thing we need, we need to define here is what is poor, right? Almost everyone, almost everyone, everyone living below your potential, you’re probably poor. You’re not, you’re not rich, you’re not prosperous, you’re poor, which is the middle class of the planet. I’m not talking about poverty.

52:02 You know, that guy, that guy’s not poor. That guy is… He’s like, he’s out of choices, he’s got to beg. The poor, the middle class, the described poor middle class. Nice name to keep everybody civil.

52:18 Um, you know, the Queen’s got 900 rooms over there. They’ve been running game here longer than anybody else. Think about it. Please, aristocracy, people in check, limited land resources. There’s a brain game going on here with your accent.

52:33 I’m telling you, these are the OGs of this story. Yeah. You take note, the Americans are like, we can’t do the class thing. If we do it, we got to get that middle class right to feel good about themselves so they don’t do what they did to the French chick, right? They chop the heads off.

52:48 Exactly, so they give them the cars and the over-leveraged homes and they feel like they’re rich, but they’re not. Yeah, like, let’s give them homes, let’s give them cars, let’s indebt them, give them a good job, give them a good office, you know, big watches and, and we got slaves, but they feel good about it because they’re better off than some, you know, starving kid in Ethiopia. So that’s why I say, man, look, the middle class is a group of selfish, self-absorbed, think about themselves.

53:22 I’m not going to be a salesman, I’m better than that. You know, I’m a banker, dude. I’m the vice president without a job, I’m not going backwards. I’m not going to use Facebook and Instagram, I’m not going to do that to get known. I’m not going to go to that meeting, I’m not going to drive there.

53:44 I got kids, this is a mother, I got two kids, you don’t understand. I’m English, that works in America, all this is selfish b******t. You know, it’s just selfish. And you say selfish, not… It’s self-centered, man.

53:58 What does selfish mean? It means, it means I’m interested in self, right? I’m the president, I’m a drug addict. Okay, that’s selfish. You’re talking about yourself, everything that starts with I.

54:09 You know, and by the way, I am selfish, like, like, so I’m not denying it. You guys that are fighting it, you know, you don’t like me right now. You, you, you’ll learn to like me if you come back, you’ll, you’ll start getting it. You make horrible first impressions, right? I mean, I make terrible…

54:23 You’re making a good one on me, right? Well, well, you’re… because you are who you are though. You’ve confronted your demons, right? You’re looking at your weaknesses. I’ve looked at my weaknesses so I can see other people’s, and I don’t see them as one person anymore.

54:38 Like, when I was 30 years old I saw the sales process, I’m like, this is terrible for everybody. It’s terrible for the user, the sales guy that’s got to lie, not answer questions, that’s lying, man. So it’s terrible for the customer, ultimately it’s gonna be terrible for the industry. Slows everything down. Remember, remember the old adage was like, the longer you spent with somebody, the better off you are?

54:59 Like, this is stupid, dude. Not true. Why do I want to spend a long time getting the job done, right? So, so when I saw that, I’m an observation person, like, I see things, I, I… My eyes are wide open, and so when I see that, I’m like, well, that’s dumb.

55:14 When I see me over the years say, I’m not, dude, I don’t have time for Facebook, man, I… I say, oh wait, wait, that, that Facebook thing might be that gift. I was asking for something to scale, how can I scale the planet? Facebook comes along, the first thing I say is, that’s stupid, and I heard that. Okay, every time I’ve ever said something was dumb or stupid, meant I didn’t understand it.

55:39 That’s code for I don’t understand it, right? And, and then, and then I wake up, it’s like a caution light goes off in my mind, says, pay attention to that thing, and then I went, got a Facebook page. I didn’t hire somebody to give me a Facebook page, I didn’t delegate it to somebody else, I went and built my own, learned how to use it, found out what was there, you know, played in that space for a little while, and then I heard about Twitter. So I’m off topic, but, but, but the point is these are gifts, man.

56:07 They’re being delivered to the planet right now, every day they’re being delivered, and whoever can play the game the best and decipher between truth and, like, leaving that treatment center, you’re never going to make it, dude, if you do all these things. I bought that s*** by the way. I wouldn’t write a book for 26 years. That book was in me at 25. I should have written that book at 25.

56:28 Why didn’t you? The dude told me, man, leave it alone, man. I bought it, I bought it to some degree. Right, even though you told them to f*** off. Yeah, yeah, but I bought it, it was in there, so I bought…

56:38 And just to finish off with the middle class, they’re being selfish because they’re not willing to dare, they’re not willing to bruise their own ego and get out of their comfort zone and actually do something, and they hide behind this thing of, I’m not… you’re doing something, you’re just not doing enough to get out of the middle class. Okay, you’re doing, you’re doing more than everybody, and then, and then you stop doing what’s necessary. So 2008, when the economy crashed, right, that was a crash, by the way, that was a full-on depression, and anybody calls it less than that, it’s not… not confront reality.

57:09 So, and there’ll be another reckoning that will be longer, deeper and more harmful to more people, that, that stripped off the, like, uh-oh, we’re, we’re in another… You know, whatever we’re in right now is la-la land. So, so people need to be made aware over and over. The, the, the marketplace disciplines the undisciplined, and, and, and right now people are undisciplined again, right? And ’08 just basically destroyed a lot of people’s egos, took their comfort zones out of them and said, okay, how are you going to make it through this?

57:42 You got to go deep, you got to see what you’re going to be made of. Yeah. And then 0.808… Was, for me, was a game changer. Like, how so?

57:50 That was the gift, that was the ultimate gift in my life, the best thing ever happened to me. What happened? I almost had everything taken away. So, oh wait, I guess I’ve been doing business for 20 years, I, I was, you know, I was a millionaire many times and, but, but I was… I got down to my last six or eight or something, man, I was like, damn, dude.

58:08 Because you would put your money in real estate? Well, what happened was the first two businesses, the, the first business was the consulting business where I gave these guys this idea about sales. Second business was a consulting business for car dealers, where we went and just worked in the car industry, that’s all we did. That, those two businesses, they were really hand in hand. I would do this one thing, it supported this second thing.

58:28 The second business was very symbiotic to the first one, which is something I really recommend to people with starting a second business. It shouldn’t be separated, it should be like hand-in-glove. They really should fit together. Different staff? Oh, different staff, different staff.

58:42 Okay, but, but the first one should support any movement in the first one should support, like, they’re moving like this. Okay, you know, it’s almost like a flotilla, they’re running together. And then the third business was a separate business. It was basically because these two were producing cash, I needed a third business not dependent upon my genius, my personality, and this was the first business that could run by itself. It was real…

59:06 It was apartments, uh, unlike what you have here. You don’t really have what I buy. Okay, in, in, in the UK, so these are large apartment complexes, 50 units, 100,300 units, 500 units, where people rent, where they live. Okay, right, not these tall-sized scrapers, because most people buy individually. No, no, no, those are one… those are single units in a big building, right, that a bunch of people share.

59:31 These are, these are, um, I want the renter, I don’t want to sell the unit, right? I want the in… I want the cash flow. That was the third business. Okay, and why real estate, why that asset class for you?

59:42 You said before you only invest in things you can see. Yeah, I, you know, I, I’ve just always loved real estate. I think, I think most people resonate, real property resonates with people. Unfortunately, most people just buy the wrong kind of real estate. You know that, again, it’s a selfish decision to have a home.

1:00:02 Okay, most people shouldn’t buy a home. No one should buy a home. Interesting. Which is the opposite of the amount… Homes were not built for people, homes were built for banks.

1:00:12 The bank created that product to sell money. You can’t just loan people money, you need a product in between. Like, when people start really understanding what I’m telling, they’re like, wait, what? Do you just say the bank can’t lend money for just money? Like, you need a reason to borrow money.

1:00:31 Oh, you’re starting a business, that’s a reason, but it’s really risky for the bank. What if a bunch of bankers sitting around drinking bourbon, do we… we need to lend more money, we got to lend money out, man, that’s how we make money. We get people to give us a dollar, we lend it out nine times. I read that book when I was a kid, man, when it was 16 years old. So we lend it out nine times, we need something to lend the money on.

1:00:55 So back in the 50s they’re like, everybody should have a home. They grinned, everybody should have a home, right? Oh man, that’s pretty good. This, we should call it something like the American Dream. You can’t just call it a house, right?

1:01:12 Everyone should have one, right? They got the politicians behind it. Yes, everyone should have one. And then what they did was basically those homes were built for banks, because who made all the money on the humps wasn’t even the builder, certainly wasn’t the homeowner, it was always the banks. Colleges was another scheme by the bank.

1:01:32 Okay, everyone should have a proper education, but they don’t have the money for it, but they should have it, and it is. They offered debt, as they offered free loans to college students and families, those tuitions went up, right? So we’ve been sold a big old fat lie. And what do people say when you tell them that you’re crushing everything they’ve been told their whole life? They’re like, no, Grant, that’s not true, I want to own my own…

1:01:59 Most people are going to write me after this interview and say, can you explain that again? Shouldn’t I own my own home? No, you should never own one door, right? And you had a horrible experience with your first single family homebuyer. Well, you don’t, man, nobody’s done the research as well as you.

1:02:12 No one. You’ve been hanging out with the wrong people, Grant. Probably. So that taught you a lesson, stay away from single family homes. I want a certain type of person with a certain type of income that wants a rental property, doesn’t want to buy, and I’m in this asset class and I know how to do it and it works.

1:02:24 I mean, we could do… Look, I could come here and we could do four hours on real estate. Yeah, no, I just want to just cover it, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s interesting, because, like, I don’t think most people know that you’re like, I do this thing. Yeah, I mean, most people never heard a real estate guy, which you’re not, yeah, say don’t buy a home.

1:02:38 Yeah, I mean, that’s fascinating, statement right there. Have you heard of that, the whole De Beers marketing myth around a diamond lasts forever and how they sold the whole world? No, no, I haven’t. You should read Index. It’s a similar thing, because before, in the 1920s, nobody ever gave a diamond for a wedding.

1:02:52 That’s like something that was manufactured by the whole South African diamond industry. Guess what, there’s no secondary market, nobody goes and buys a you diamond, because that’s, that’s unethical. You can save it forever. So they create this artificial supply. Sure, and demand.

1:03:06 It’s a fascinating thing, but I’ve never heard it makes sense with homes or education. All right, so you see younger with homes, okay, much bigger homes, and so you see this. You put your money in there. Is it true you go broke twice a year? Can you explain that concept?

1:03:19 So the, the concept is, um, you know, the… every business that I create is, is to produce cash flow. So if, if the business doesn’t produce positive cash flow, I’m not going to do the business. So I’m going to miss a bunch of great stuff, like the Netflixes that operate on negative cash flow for years because they go raise the money. By the way, that is cash on the backs of somebody else. I just can’t do it because I know most of those things bust out.

1:03:45 The, the investors, they bought the paper, the stock. Another topic, and it’ll be, it’ll be, it’ll be devastating for millions and millions of people. See, people that invest in the stock market are lazy people. They’re lazy and they’re selfish. They just took the, the IRA, the, the, the, the Kio, the, uh, 401(k), all that retirement, all the pension funds, and all of us just…

1:04:07 Lazy, dude, and lazy is selfish, and she’s lazy because they’re not doing the due diligence, they’re not investing in themselves. It was easy, it was easy for you, you, you just bought the ETFs. You’d be a… we’re in a huge ETF bubble right now. Straight at futures. Yeah, exactly.

1:04:23 Trillions of dollars sitting in ETs, trillions of dollars sitting in cash. Having cash sitting a bank today is selfish, you know. So the hard thing to do, I remember my mom telling me, she’s, I said, I’m gonna get in real estate, and she’s like, why, why do you wanna do that? Because I wanna be rich. I told you when I was 16, I was gonna be rich one day and I was gonna help a lot of people.

1:04:44 I can’t help people if I can’t take care of my own money. I can’t keep speaking and going around the country and traveling forever. This real estate thing, oh, she’s like, you’re gonna have tenants calling you at midnight. I f***ing hope so. She’s like, why, why, why do you say that?

1:04:58 I said, because they’re calling me, they’re written from me. What you don’t want is, you don’t want people not calling you. You know, I hope I have thousands of people calling me, tens of thousands, that would be my hope. So you see, hard work and the obstacle as the way forward, and when people are doing the easy thing, dude, people are calling me, they’re doing business with me. Okay, like, I don’t want people not calling me.

1:05:21 Okay, I want people calling me, so I want people complaining, I want people to hate me. Like, at least you know me, at least you have an opinion about me, but not knowing me, not knowing me means I’m not in the game. I’m not even, even in the stadium. I want things to happen around me, right? So, so I started buying real estate.

1:05:44 I bought, I bought one single family home, six months later sold it, realized it was a mistake, she moved out, I don’t have a tenant, I’ll never do that again. Blew the house out as fast as I could, broke even, and then the next deal I would buy would be, uh, 38 units, then 48 units, then 92 units. I mean, now we buy about 1,200 units in the last two months. Okay, so your, your question was, you go broke twice a year? Yeah.

1:06:11 What, what I do is I accumulate cash. I don’t let cash sit in a bank, that’s what my mom did her entire life. She let that money my dad left sit in the bank, maybe earned a little dividend stock. I take that money, I put it in real assets. I don’t give it to New York.

1:06:26 I know, I know that’s a damn casino. Tell me about New York from Wall Streeters. You know, come on, man, just go visit their buildings. Go visit… all you got to do is go, go to Goldman Sachs, walk in the building, take the elevator up. You’re going to one of most Wall Streeters, including me, put their money where we don’t put it in any financial instruments.

1:06:47 Exactly, or stocks or bonds, bankruptcy standard. Even Buffett, I think, is the same thing. Bank of America will lend me money to buy real estate, but they won’t lend me money to buy their own stock. That should be a good enough indicator. Real, it’s real, I can see it, it’s a simple business.

1:07:03 My real estate will be bigger than all my other businesses combined. It is the easiest, simplest business that I have, and it’s indestructible, that’s the other reason. So twice a year I’m going to go broke. I accumulate cash, once I get a certain amount I start looking for a place for that money to go. It’s going to go into a real asset.

1:07:20 Illiquid is good, not bad, right? So I don’t want liquidity, I don’t want money. Explain why liquid’s good. Illiquid? Yeah, ill-liquid is good because it’s in an asset, it’s…

1:07:33 I don’t want access to the money. You know, they say cash is king, cash is garbage. You’re trying to motivate yourself by getting rid of the cash, get rid of the money to make yourself earn more cash. I have to go back into the marketplace and say, who’s got my money, right? So you’re, like, going for broke every six months, you’re like, okay guys, I’m getting ready to go broke again.

1:07:51 How’s that feel? Exciting. Well, now, now I have confidence that, that I can, you know, you’ve done this, then I can go back and get it again. So you like the illiquid? So you’re just a contrarian, you’re a massive contrarian.

1:08:04 Did I wish I would’ve bought everything in London 10 or 15 or 20 years ago? Yeah, you know. Yeah, so what happens is, and this is true about real estate all over the world, is the people that live in the local area never change the real estate landscape because they’re looking in the rearview mirror. They’re like, I can’t buy, I can’t pay that price for it, because I could have bought it years ago for less. New guy comes in town and says, f***, I’m buying it all.

1:08:29 Right, so when I came to London, the first big win I had while I was here, I’m going back to America, I’m gonna buy everything I can. America’s on sale. It’s on sale, it’s f***, we’re giving America away. Some of the buildings that I’m buying right now here would be worth, I mean, I’m gonna buy one deal before the end of the year, it’s probably worth five or six hundred million dollars here, maybe a billion dollars. I’ll pay 160 for it there, and 10 years from now you and I will sit down again, I’ll be like, dude, I cracked it.

1:09:02 I cracked that building for a half a billion. I was off by half, but… You like real estate because it produces income. Okay, so, and it’ll produce income when I’m dead and for your daughters and for my charities, right? So I can literally set those up to say, hey, I’m going to own that thing for 30 years or 50 years or 60 years.

1:09:22 This real estate’s been here for a long time. Yeah, Queen owns a lot of it. She has, no dummy, no. Yeah, she knows a lot of that, you know, they still own India or something, I don’t know. Who knows?

1:09:33 What they’ll tell us about that. And you said for the first, until you get your first hundred thousand, invest in yourself anyways, don’t be going out. Yeah, first hundred people, people, you know, look, there, there could be, I could change my opinion on this, right, but, but people are trying to invest too soon. They’re like, I got five grand, should I put in crypto? No, you should not.

1:09:52 You don’t have any money to put risk. You put the five grand in you, it’s no money. Like, don’t think you have any money, you’re broke, so invest in yourself. Just keep investing in yourself until you actually have the ability, the marketplace proves that you have the ability to produce money over and over again, because until you know that personally, it doesn’t matter what I know. The individual needs to know, I have the ability to reproduce money.

1:10:18 Why do people save money? Because they’re worried about… Why do they save for a rainy day? Because they’re scared, they’re not confident that they can make more money. Exactly, they’re not confident that they can create more income and hold on to it, and in a way you prove to yourself that you can make it through the tough market, that you can thrive in a tough market.

1:10:37 Well, I proved, you know what, what happened was 0.8 validated that I was too vertical, that I was too one-laned, that I was too focused on one industry, which was property in South Florida. No, at that time it was the automotive industry, that’s where we were consulting mostly, right? So number one, I was too focused on one vertical. I’ve heard guys say, stay in one lane. You know, there’s six lanes, you know, if this one gets blocked up, you need to use the other ones.

1:11:08 You might have to go off-road, you might have to jump the middle lane and go the other way. So that’s what ’08 taught me: go wide, go this way. Okay, and now what does that look like today? Well, today it looks like, you know, in, in eight years I produced, uh, you know, produced more money in eight years than my entire, my entire career, 100 times, and diversified into the consumer lane and, and all sorts of different types of products. Now we’re doing corporate, consumer, we’re doing multiple languages.

1:11:39 I wrote a book and called The Millionaire Booklet. I wrote that book in two hours. It was translated to 38 languages for free because of my social, my social media standing around the world. I just asked a bunch of people, can you help me? 38 languages, and literally in one month the whole book was produced, written, translated, like, you need friends.

1:11:59 Counter-intuitive, 50-page pamphlet-type book. Yeah, you’re making, not the New York Times bestseller. Yeah. Where’d that come from? Another contrarian again, again, like, like the book publishers, you know, they’re, they’re dying, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re… come on, man, you don’t need that, that’s antiquated, that you don’t even count digital downloads, like, what’s wrong with you, right?

1:12:19 So give them something they can read in a couple hours. It took me 19 months to write my last book because the publisher was involved. Okay, I’m not supposed to write a book while I’m writing a book, so I wrote a booklet. Okay, wrote the booklet in two hours. The booklet made more money in 19 days than the other book made in 19 months and was translated, translated in 38 languages.

1:12:45 The other book that took 19 months, publishers, editors, but, you know, all this energy, all this wasted freaking energy and money, still hasn’t been translated. So speed, see, I’m now back to how fast can I work, compressed time. Time is money. Most people don’t, don’t even understand the concept. Like, what, what does that even mean?

1:13:06 They say it but they don’t know what it means. Yeah, oh, it’s a cute saying, it’s a perfect T-shirt, but they’re not actually applying it to their life. No, they’re like, what does that mean, man? What does it mean, time is money, right? How do you multiply time?

1:13:17 How do you buy time? Rich people buy time by buying jets. There you go, there, that’s one way. I know a lot of rich people that say, don’t buy a jet. They’re not, they’re not real rich, they’re middle-class rich.

1:13:29 Okay, but that 60 million dollar jet will go to zero. You said for sure, but you said it’ll go to, go, it’s gonna go to a yard one day, but you said in the first year it made, it made it back for you because it got you more opportunities. First jet I bought was, was eight, eight and a half million dollars. I never chartered a job before that, I’ve never been on a private jet. So all you guys out there, all you pretenders out there, you’re getting on your charter and you’re just pretending for your Instagram post, it’s f***, you know, you’re not, you’re not, you’re not tricking anybody.

1:14:00 First jedi ever private jet I flew on was a used yet, about a youth jet, um, eight and a half million dollars. I wouldn’t charter a jet because I couldn’t make sense of the money. This is just the different way people think. Okay, that looked like a waste of money to you, but the charter is a total waste of money for me, because it’s going to cost me 30 grand to fly a place I could, I could literally pay 500 and go first class. I’m like, there’s no way I’m gonna do it, I’m too frugal, but I’ll spend eight and a half million.

1:14:30 Okay, now because to me that’s an investment. Charter’s a show-off. When you pay eight and a half million dollars and a jet sits out there and you know what’s going to zero, you’re going to use that s***, that’s what you do. And so in the first, literally first six months we paid for that jet. How?

1:14:49 Because it got me more places. Like, when I go on a trip I go, I was doing five cities in a, literally in a 24-hour period, bang, bang, bang, bang, seeing customers. So I kept that jet two and a half years, we just sold it at the end of the year, I bought a brand new jet and, and I’ve only been on it once and I can’t wait to get on the damn thing. But, but, but that, it’s a 60 million dollar job, like it’s f***ing unbelievable. It gets you in front of people, which you’re, you’re best in front of me.

1:15:12 We bought that jet, we bought that jet to get go around the world. Okay, again, we want to go wide now, and I don’t want to be just an Instagram guy. Okay, I’m not, I’m not… Explain that, because, like, too many of those people need contact, man, right? You know that more than anybody.

1:15:29 I want to meet people, I want to see, like, we’re staying up the street, right, and people come, God, man, hey man, thank you so much, man, I know where you’re staying, I came by just to say thank you. They don’t say they like me, they say I helped them make more money. You know, I was going to buy a house and decided not to and I bought a four unit deal and my God, that changed our whole life. That’s what I want to hear. They probably like you too, huh?

1:15:52 Well, I don’t know, dude, I make people money, they’ll like me. That is the ultimate win over. You want to win people over forever, like, we’re going to open up a fund. We’ve, we’ve had three funds, I have a fourth fund we’re getting ready to introduce. The reason we’re doing the fund is because I know the ultimate way to make a fan is not to make a customer, it’s to have them invest with you and pay them every month.

1:16:12 Like, if you want somebody to fight for you in a bar, f***, give money every month, so people start attacking me, they’ll be like, hey, leave him alone, dude, okay, that guy pays me and my family every month. So the point of that story is, like, you need friends around the world. I want my kids to have friends everywhere on this planet because it is still who you know, and will be for a long time, forever, that you, you know, technology will disrupt. Hey, I met him, you know, I had a drink with him, I spent time with him, we did a selfie together, like, those things, those moments are so meaningful and rich for, for them but also for me and my family, it’s a big deal for us.

1:16:54 So when you stop me on the street and say, hey, let’s get a photo, like, I want the photo. Okay, it means a lot to you and your wife? Means I am recovered. Explain that. It means, you know, it means I am valuable to society.

1:17:08 It, it means the promise I made my mom, that, hey, one day I’m going to be somebody, is coming true. You ever doubt that? Well, certainly along the way everybody doubted it, right? So it’s just, everybody doubted me. Yeah, including me, right?

1:17:21 So I, you know, we all need validation. It’s not… that’s not a lack of self-esteem, that, that I need validation. The therapist says you should validate yourself, and you said, this s***, dude, he’s f***ing running his s*** on everybody. He, he is the one with the problems. So when he says you’re projecting, no, no, he’s projecting his s***, his whatever, on everybody that sits across from it.

1:17:52 So, you know, he’s the one that has the issue. I, I remember sitting in front of a therapist once, he’s like, hey man, look, your problem, your problem, bro, he’s like, you’re never satisfied. You had no s***. I said, well, why is that a problem? Why don’t we use that, man?

1:18:12 Like, Elon Musk, he’s not satisfied. These guys, the guys that play at the top of the game, they’re f***ing geniuses. You know, they’re thinking about 50 things at one time. That’s not a disease, man, it’s a gift. Right, I got windows open all the time.

1:18:29 I got a bunch of windows open while I’m sitting here talking to you. I can do that, I’m a spiritual being, I’m not limited to one window being open. You’re a spiritual being? Most people would not think that about Grant Cardone. Oh, dude, number one most important thing in my life is not my wife, not my kids and not my business, it’s me as a spiritual unit.

1:18:47 Can you explain what that spiritual unit is? You know, it’s, it’s, it’s what I’ve always wanted, man, everything, everything from, from the… when I saw my dad doing the things in the back, the pecans and the branches, it was, it was the artist. You know, it was, it was aesthetics of work. It was probably why I frown on some of this other stuff, the four hours and the, you know, make it easy or do the spiritual being done, he, he the fantastic. You know, um, you know, I like the idea, I created the heavens and the earth and the rivers and the lakes and the mountains and the sun and the moon and all the stars, and then I took a day off.

1:19:29 I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you took a day off, because I don’t think time exists. Like, you know, you just create and create and create. So that’s what I’ve always been interested in, you know. Like, are you connecting with divine in everything you do?

1:19:42 Do you feel that power when you’re at your greatest, you know? I, I don’t think about connecting with it, I think it is, like, we are that. I’m not trying to connect to something else. Okay, you know, getting it from within you and letting it out, and that was your dad there on the, uh, on the backyard, and that’s you when you’re flowing. Yeah, but I’m always flowing, even when it’s not going, like, it’s not flowing, right?

1:20:06 I’m like, like, it’s just part of the… I don’t know, man, I mean, I don’t know what I’m talking about right now except that I’m discovering some genius and, and by showing up, you know, like, I discover it. Like, I did this gig, I don’t know, three weeks ago, when I got done with it I was like, I said, dude, I think I tapped into some… Like something really crazy, bro, like it was like something that’s gonna live a long, long time. A piece of data I shared for three hours on finances, but it was… there was genius in it, right?

1:20:37 But you can’t have that without showing up a bunch. I think, I think Van Gogh painted, like, in 50 years he painted, like, I don’t know, 5,000 pieces, 800 sketches, you know, uh, 700 canvases, like these crazy numbers, like it was like he’s painting two things, pieces a day. It was frequency and quantity. You know, so if God created the heavens and the earth, I guarantee you this isn’t the only one. He was spraying around a lot of stuff, and then something beautiful comes out of the experience, right, out of the out of the effort, and that’s why some of this, I’m going to work part time, I want to work from home, dude, it’s so small and selfish.

1:21:19 And selfish, it’s little, because you’re, you’re, you’re not… you’re doing your growth. You’re going to burn out, Grant, you’re going to burn out. I’ve heard this, I’ve heard this a thousand times. You’re going to burn out, dude, at this pace, you’re going to burn out. I’ve heard that since I was 30 years old.

1:21:31 I’m not burnt out. You know, I’m not a candle, right? So I’m, I’m, I’m a spiritual being, like, you know, moving through the universe, and that’s why I like living just in the United States and operating just in the United States and making money just in the United States is selfish. Right, it’s unselfish for me to write a check for 60 million, get a plane that can bring me 14 hours nonstop so I can bring my family with me. It’s unselfish to do that.

1:21:58 I could just stay home and be the big shot in, in the United States. Instead, I want to go to Beirut. We just got a gig in Beirut, and, and my, my, uh, my wife’s like, Beirut? I don’t know, I think it could be unsafe there. Yeah, so what?

1:22:12 We’re going to be rude. You got to go, you got to go, man, you got to go, cause it’s uncomfortable, whatever, we got to go everywhere. We got to go wherever, like, like, we have to go to people, and if not, it’s just being selfish. I think so. I, I think it is, like, I’m glad I met you, we’ll be friends forever.

1:22:31 I had to come here to do this. Yeah. And so what does the next five years look like for you? You’re going global, you hate that term. Yeah, well, but I’m going global.

1:22:42 Okay, I’m going Gulfstream, you know, I’m going, uh, you know, what does it look like? I don’t know, I think it’s going to be big though. I think I’m right on the cusp of something big, really big, breaking, break and loose for me where we could literally make a big change. Okay, in a lot of different places. What is that big change?

1:23:00 Does that mean making more money for more people? The way people think, the way people think, the way they operate, you know, the, the, the idea that, hey, look, you know what, maybe it’s not best to be the entrepreneur, maybe it’s best to work for somebody else. Okay, like, there’s this whole thing, work for yourself, kind of thing going on right now. I don’t think that that’s true for most people, they can’t handle that. No, I think it’s not good for them, that you’re better off being in a vehicle.

1:23:28 I got guys that work with me, they’re, they’re way better off being with me right then. They would by themselves. Okay, so the entrepreneurship thing’s overdone? Yeah, totally. Like, like, what am I gonna do, I’m gonna do every interview by myself, dude?

1:23:41 It’s much better to do an interview with you, you already have an audience, right? Like, people are like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna work for myself. It’s dumb. What you’re saying, what are you saying is so dumb? Why, why do you want to do that?

1:23:52 So I can be my own boss. Okay, so now you’re gonna hate just one person right now? You hate yourself and your boss. When you work for yourself, you’re just going to hate you and you’re going to make less money, by the way. Worldwide, the entrepreneur makes 40 grand less, I’m sorry, 20,000 dollars in the U.S.

1:24:12 Than if he’d worked for somebody else, on average. Right, yeah. Okay, and your business is gonna die in about seven years, if you even make it that long, and by the way, again, you’re selfish. Why don’t you work with other people? It’s a team, man.

1:24:29 You were an entrepreneur, you are an entrepreneur. Yeah, but certainly for too long I was a solo. Okay, one guy, keep all the money, do all the work, just a personality, not… it wasn’t a real business and I felt like it, like, like, there’s a lot of those guys running around the planet right now. Coaches? Yeah, experts, authors.

1:24:52 You’ve met them? Yeah, coming here, they’re gonna, they’re giving business advice and they have a half a secretary. It’s not a business, man, that’s you being on stage every day talking about business. Tell me about social media. What’s a 58-year-old little boy from Louisiana, yeah, yeah, yeah, do a master in social media or teaching or, you know, how to… how does that happen, Grant?

1:25:15 I don’t know, you got me. You know, you got me, but I did figure it out. Went with your instinct. I’m probably the young… the oldest guy using social. I can’t even believe I’m saying I’m an oldest guy.

1:25:30 But you are, you know, um, yeah. It was just like, dude, just like, I resisted it for a second, which is now a sign for you that that’s something that you got always. Okay, and then when I flip, when I flip on something, we have a saying in my office: if Grant does it once, he’s gonna do it a thousand times, ten thousand times. 10X really should be like 10,000 X, but we, we knew people couldn’t have it, right? So we’re like, I just, just dropped the zeros, 10X is good enough.

1:25:59 And what does 10X mean? And it’s essence, it’s a multiplier, it’s the value of multiplying. Do more and then do more, multiply, multiply what you’re doing. You want to multiply, you want to scale out. People are like, uh, should you scale?

1:26:11 I’ve heard guys say not everybody should scale. You shouldn’t be in a business and can’t scale. Nothing should be done that can’t scale. You know, I want to love my wife and I want to love the planet, I want to scale my love. You know, I want to scale my family, I don’t…

1:26:28 I don’t want to be confined to a wife and two kids. I want, I want millions of people in my family. My wife wants the same thing, we want billions of people to feel good about us, to support us, and we can support them. I want, I want, like, literally I want tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people to invest with me. So next five years, I mean, that’s the ultimate play.

1:26:51 The ultimate play is I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna challenge the way Wall Street steals from people. What’s your reaction when… do you say this stuff, do people hate you? Well, I can’t hate you anymore when you start telling people Wall Street’s stealing, the banks are stealing, the government’s stealing, all these people are stealing. What do people say, come, you know, defend something, defend yourself from wrong? None of them pop up, they don’t say anything.

1:27:18 How’s Grant different than, say, five years ago? Uh, Grant, Grant, Grant, uh, how is he different than five years ago? Man, you asked some good questions. Um, I mean, you’ve evolved in a big way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it’s happening right now.

1:27:30 I, you know, I used to say to myself, I wasn’t, this is after I cleaned up, but I said, I don’t think I’m going to have anything to say until I’m about 50. And be careful what you say to yourself, you know, because you’ll make it true. So, uh, but, but, but I think that’s happening. I’m figuring out my… What’s true for me.

1:27:50 You know, I’m a very, very authentic guy. I do not teach or recommend or tell anybody to do anything I don’t have personal experience in. So I was doing a gig the other day and the lady started asking me about her son. I said, look, I’m not a life coach, I’m not here giving anybody advice on how to run their life. I can, I’ll show you how to be successful, or how I’ve been successful in my business, and, and, but, but I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna play in the, the life coach thing.

1:28:17 I think it’s dangerous. Most of the guys that are talking about it don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. So the next five years could be, could be big, man. How it’s different than five years ago, the think is much bigger. I got a much better team, I got a much bigger team.

1:28:33 Do you have any mentors? Many mentors, many, most of which I would call the negative mentor. What’s that? The, the, the, the flip side of what people think about when they say mentors, you know. I’ve looked at a number of guys that are like, okay, I don’t want to do that.

1:28:51 First thing I look for is what not to do, not what to do. So I learned more from what not to do than what to do. Just show me what not to do, what road not to go down. I’m going to get wherever I’m going. That’s what the mentor does for you, tells you what not to do?

1:29:06 No, no, I watch, he didn’t tell me anything, I just watched. Like, I’ve never asked anybody, hey, would you be my mentor? That never works anyways. That’s a surefire way to get a no, dude. If he’s got time, you don’t want him to mentor you.

1:29:19 So, so there’s, you watch, like, we close, I watch, and then, like, 50 that you said available. You were 20, then you didn’t learn anything. So, so you want to study all their content. The, one of the problems today I see socially, particularly because of the internet, is that guys are studying so many different people, most of which is not even study now, it’s just a meme quote, it’s a quote here, a quote there, quote there. You know, one guy, one guy’s response, 50 guys are responsible for one quote.

1:30:00 That’s what social media is. You know, it’s, it’s awful. You don’t like that part of it? It’s a garbage dump, right? I mean, it’s a garbage dump.

1:30:08 It’s a great garbage dump for me, but because I don’t, I don’t watch it, I use it, it’s just distribution for me. Elon Musk, you mentioned, I mean, is he a mentor in some ways? Do you watch him, does he inspire? Yeah, I’m a little worried he’s going to bust out here, man. Sometimes I’m like, dang, you know, I think my boy is going to bust out.

1:30:26 But how so? Cause he’s saying controversial things? No, just cause, like, I don’t know, the Tesla thing bothers me, I’m not that impressed with the car. Okay, um, I mean, it goes fast, it looks good until you get in it and then I’m like, I’m not that impressed. But, but dude, the guy, the guy, the way the guy thinks is massive, like going to Mars.

1:30:45 See, that inspires me, right? Just going big. Yeah, going to Mars, I don’t… I don’t know where it is, I kind of have an idea, I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, I don’t know what’s there. F*** it, let’s do it, right?

1:31:00 I don’t even know if we can do it, but he, he’s a big thinker. See, that’s 10X. 10X’s wherever you are. Let’s say you’re doing 600,000 pounds a year and you’re like, man, that took so much work. That guy wouldn’t say, I’m going to go to 6 million, I don’t know how, this was a lot of work.

1:31:16 But the think changes when you start going ten times, not one times or two times or three times. When you start scaling out to ten times, the think changes. You know, the mechanism, the transportation, the people you need, the advertising, the budget, everything shifts so big that it causes you to think different, and that’s what inspires me about Musk, is like, think so enormous, rewire your brain, throw out all your assumptions. So, like, when you were asking about the jet, all the guys I know that have money told me not to buy the jet.

1:31:46 It was the guys that have a lot more money than I have that said, yeah, dude, you should definitely do it. The billionaire said, yeah, you should definitely buy a jet, right? Because they really value their time, they, they understand what I would do with it. They’re like, look, man, you got tremendous work ethic, you’re very disciplined, you’re not buying it to show off, you will freaking… you’ll pay for that thing many times. And you make impressions in person better than online?

1:32:12 Maybe not, I don’t know. Worse? I don’t know, I guess I gotta leave that up to other people, you know. Um, well, I think I’m taller on Instagram. It’s all on Instagram.

1:32:22 I am too, apparently. Yeah, um, what’s it like being a father? What do you learn about it every day? Unbelievable, man, you know, now you can get me all teared up, but I mean, I just, I love my kids, you know, and I’m a good father. I’m a terrible mother, I’m a great father.

1:32:36 So I’m, uh, you know, I make the time. Um, you know, I, I push the kids, we don’t give them too much, we give them enough to get a taste. You know. So, so, uh, you know, I’m a good father, man. I’m, I’m available for them, I make time, and, uh, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re gonna have, you know, my, my, my oldest daughter, my nine-year-old, asked me today this.

1:33:01 She said, you know, your, your mother would be very proud of you. They’re like, dang, dog, that’s strong, that’s proud. Yeah, yeah. How old is she now? She’s not…

1:33:10 So I was getting to the age you were at when you lost your father. Yeah, exactly. What you think about it? Exactly, exactly, yeah, totally. How do you… and then, you know, you were created in a crucible, Grant, right?

1:33:20 A f***ing crucible. How do you mean? I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know, I mean, the reason you are who you are today is probably because you went through this crazy time of death and addiction and Louisiana and mayhem, and I always wonder when people like you grow up and you have these kids and you’re thinking, you know, I want to give them the best, I want to protect them and all that stuff, and I’m always wondering, do you ever think, yeah, are they going to grow up to be all they can be without, you know, without then they won’t get any of it?

1:33:48 They either will, they won’t, they’ll either, regardless of that. Well, they would, they, I, you know what I’m saying. Then they’re going to go from flying private to flying commercial and nobody likes that s***, right? The Buffett style, they don’t get any. But I’m, I’m just wondering, do you think, you know, uh, st… you know, steel, sharp, sharpened steel, and then you need to have some real grit in your…

1:34:04 Yeah, look, look, you know, I, I, I mean, I would rather be me than them, I can tell you that. Okay, because the, the necessity. There’s nobody I’d rather be than me, except maybe Kevin Hart, uh, but, but I would rather be me than my kids, just because, man, because I’ve made it. I’ve made it through the darkness and, and I know how to work and, you know, that they’ll have, that they’ll have that choice, and they’ll either do it or they won’t do it. You know, the one thing that I did learn from my mother was no matter what my mom did, she could have done more, less, with me, more, lectured me more, it wouldn’t have changed anything, dude.

1:34:48 I was going down the path I was going down and she couldn’t have been any better a parent. Could she had done this or that different? Yeah, but wouldn’t, it wasn’t… There’s only so much a parent can do. At some point the parent, the kid’s going to do what he’s got to do.

1:35:04 When we moved, and when we moved to Miami, we live in a condo, we’re on the 33rd floor, and I told… I brought him out to the deck, there’s a deck that wraps around the entire place, everybody has their own floor, and I brought the kids out to the deck and I’m like, you see this? This is 33 floors up, right? It’s 330 feet above the ground. If you guys lean over this balcony and fall, you’ll only do it one time, and it’s gonna hurt.

1:35:28 It’s your call, whatever you wanna do. That’s your parenting style? Well, I mean, just leave it up to them, they’re intelligent, man. Yeah, kids are intelligent. Yeah, you know, I’ve always, like, I, I understand it, I, I understand at a young age I understood things, so they’re not stupid.

1:35:46 If anybody’s dumb in that relationship, it’s the parent, not the kid. Politics ever for you? Yeah, I saw it about 10 minutes ago, I was like, wait a second, probably… Nah, I mean, you know, maybe this Trump thing, man, he, he stripped so much of it, but see the problem is, Trump has now made open the door up that I would have to compete with Rock, okay, and his following. You know, so it’s like, probably not, I’d get scorched, dude.

1:36:13 I have so much stuff online that people would use against me. You have a look at Trump, man, he’s just… I know, and I’m weaving. Yeah, could be interesting. Yeah, um, what scares you?

1:36:24 You know what scares me, man, just not fulfilling, you know, not doing as much as I could do, you know, that scares me, you know. You still think about dying too young? Yeah, oh yeah, I’m certainly now, you know, I mean, look, at 20 in the red zone now, you’re, you’re… Oh yeah, older than Dad. Oh yeah, six years.

1:36:41 Yeah, yeah, yeah, so now I’m 60. So, um, now I’m like, okay, dude, life cycle, what can you leave now? Now I’m thinking about how much can I leave, so that 50 years from now somebody’s studying my material. So everything that we produce in our office is all with that idea. I tell my guys all the time, dude, you need to start building this thing so that, like, machine goes on.

1:37:06 Yeah, yeah, I tell my wife to constantly look, pay attention now. Long-term planning, even after you’re gone. Yeah, that makes the great stuff, that makes the best stuff. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, you know, but let’s face it, like, if you’re not here, you’re not relevant.

1:37:19 So true. Grant, I always ask people a few questions. Yeah, sure. And I’m going to ask you, you can make a phone call to that 20-year-old Grant. Yeah.

1:37:26 And give that young man a bit of advice. I guess he’s right in the middle of it now. I always say 20. I’m not picking that. Yeah, you, but I mean, I guess you’re in the addiction, older brother just died.

1:37:35 It don’t… it doesn’t matter, that kid can’t, he can’t hear anything. So I’m gonna say that call, save that dime, you can’t hear anything, dude. You pound him on the, uh, you pound him over the forehead, won’t matter, he’s gotta hit bottom on his own. Yeah, I mean, he’s just got some time, he’s gonna have to work the deal out. I mean, if I told him anything, it would be like, dude, I’m so disappointed, I’d f***ing hammer him with that, be like, so disappointed in you, you know, what a f***ing shame you’re… that’s what he, he really needs, just to, you know, you should be disgusted with, you know, go use some more drugs.

1:38:11 You know, just tell him, go for it, bro, you want to f***ing die, you want to die with a needle in your… go get it. Why you taking so long? Do you see people like that now, ever? And you’re just like, well, people don’t talk to me. I mean, the most I get from guys right now is, hey man, I’m smoking weed, do you think that’s a problem?

1:38:33 So people, they’re not really, you know, and you say, yeah, because it’s gonna go get worse? No, no, I say, yeah, dude, it’s a problem, because if you compete with me and you’re smoking weed and I’m not, I’m gonna f***ing kill you, dude. In every deal I’ll kill you. Well, how do you know that, man? It makes me creative.

1:38:53 Well, the fact that you had to take the time to go smoke the weed, I already got a f***ing jump on you. Okay, the fact that you’re asking means you’re in doubt. I don’t ask that question. The fact that you got to go to the washroom and wash it off your hands, because I can smell it, that you got to put cologne on, I don’t have to put cologne on, I don’t have to cover anything up, you do. That’s one less question I have to ask myself every day.

1:39:14 I already got enough questions to ask, dude. There’s this, this plan is already overly competitive, right? Like, it’s already hard, and then you just made it harder on yourself. The fact that you were driving, I’m at 80 clicks, I’m 80 kilometers per hour and you’re driving 80 and you smoke a little of the cushy couch, right, and the next thing you know you’re going 47 kilometers and you don’t even know it. I’m still going 80, bro.

1:39:39 So those are my reasons for not smoking weed. Second part of that question, best advice you ever received your whole life, could have been from your mom or your dad. Yeah, uh, or a mentor. Get out of the stands and onto the field.

1:40:20 Instagram is a giant stadium of spectators. Get on the field, bro. You know, and man in the arena. Yeah, get, get, get in the fight, get in the fight, it’s the best place to be. It’s the safest place in the arena, is on the field.

1:40:38 Safest place, safest place on, in the arena? Why? Because, you know, if something goes bad in that arena, dude, that field is safe. The floor, the court is the safest place in the room. Stage is the safest place in the room.

1:40:54 I think about that one. Yeah. Grant, you are nothing like your media footprint. Oh well, and you’ve been, and you’ve even said that, that’s your fault because you put out crazy stuff over there. Yes.

1:41:04 But I guess that was just you being you, but, you know, you’re nothing like what a lot of people think you are. You must hear that a lot. Well, I, I, I don’t know what people think I am. So I do. I, I, you know, I, you know, what do you think?

1:41:16 I’m in the media business, right? Yeah. And, like, you know, I’m even in the digital product business, right? And I knew a little bit about you and what you do and I’m just like, okay, what’s going on? Is he the real estate guy?

1:41:25 Is he the sales guy? And then this, and then the jet, and he’s standing on his jets, and I’m like, okay, he’s over the top, but he’s got the cigar, and I’m like, okay, who is this guy? But, you know, you’re, you’re not that guy. You know, you’re a guy, but, but I am. You are that guy, but I am those things.

1:41:39 You’re not only that guy. That’s right, but why be only, you know, why not all those things, right? So everything I am, I am. Though, you know, I’m not trying to be a guy, I’m not. So, so at the end of the day I’m just figuring out too, I say it wrong half the time, you know.

1:41:58 I know there’s a better way for me to say, I don’t know why I say it wrong the first time, you know, but, uh, I’ll figure it out, man. F***. Grant, on Monday we say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours. Yeah, I really enjoyed this a lot.

1:42:11 Yeah, and I hope we see you again. Thank you, man, appreciate you.