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- [00:00]
A
So now we got a couple thousand pieces, but that's not my goal. My goal is 10,000. I want 10,000. We bought a 230 million dollar asset last year, real estate asset. We added $100 million of Bitcoin to that. I had never ever sold a deal to get my promotion, ever. But with the bitcoin, if that bitcoin goes to a million dollars tomorrow, guarantee you I'm gonna sell that bitcoin. The reach that I compete with can never do this. This is my perfect moat. They can never do this. The laws in this country are terrible for the non accredited investors. The real estate and the bitcoin combined is going to become a bit of a biological transformation financial vehicle.
- [00:55]
B
That's dope, dude. You bought a ton of bitcoin.
- [00:58]
A
I have lots of bitcoin, you know, I hope it's the right thing to do.
- [01:02]
B
You went from zero to a hundred faster than pretty much anyone I had.
- [01:05]
A
I had bitcoin since 13, so I probably had it before Gary had it actually. And, and because I was given.
- [01:11]
B
Not that it's a competition or anything.
- [01:13]
A
No, it's not. It's not. It's just a lot of people think that I just got into it. Yeah. The truth is I, you know, I was given 500. No, I was given 115 pieces. It was worth $513 at the time. Still, still on them. I think we sold enough to pay for the trip to fly to Vegas.
- [01:34]
B
Right.
- [01:34]
A
And do the gig in the hotel room, whatever that was. And I still have that bitcoin. And I kind of just forgot about it. I just put it there like probably a lot of people, right? And, and then I watched it run up and fall and run up and fall. And then I said, hey, maybe I'll. Maybe I'll start adding this, you know, start every once in a while taking a little dip. So now we got, you know, I'm probably a couple thousand pieces, casual couple thousand.
- [02:03]
B
But it happened.
- [02:04]
A
But that's not my goal. My goal is 10,000. I want 10,000.
- [02:07]
B
Yeah, I think your brother says his goal is a thousand, you know.
- [02:09]
A
Right.
- [02:10]
B
I think.
- [02:10]
A
Right, yeah. So you got, whether you achieve the target or not, it's. You got to have a target. And I did this, I've done this in sales, I've done this writing books. I've done it. Income, monthly income, annual income, a wife, kids, the house. Everything starts for me with a target. Like I have to have a specific target of something I'm trying to achieve and then back into it. So I know how many real estate projects I need to do to get to 10,000 units. To get enough real estate units to get enough 10,000 units of Bitcoin, because we combine the two. I'm not buying.
- [02:50]
B
Yeah. What happens when you achieve the goal? Like, I'm not talking about specific to bitcoin, but you just mentally, like, you have this thing, you back into it, you achieve it. So then what.
- [03:00]
A
Yeah, what happens actually is I've never achieved it, any goal that I've ever written. Because what happens is on the way there, when you get closer to it, you're like, oh, dude, like, this is gonna be. I'm gonna be able to do this. Like this is gonna happen. And then you move it.
- [03:17]
B
Yeah.
- [03:18]
A
So I never actually achieve it. It gets moved before I get there.
- [03:21]
B
So 10,000 is going to be 20,000. It's gonna be 100,000. All right, so talk about backing into 10,000 though, because it's a big number. And I would imagine that actually it's beneficial for prices to be depressed.
- [03:33]
A
Well, it's gotten easier, you know, it's gotten 30, 35% easier.
- [03:37]
B
As you check the price, I'm like,
- [03:39]
A
what is that exactly?
- [03:40]
B
There's a, There's a. For people who can't see, there's a price thing on there. 66ish.
- [03:43]
A
It got 35% easier in the last two weeks. So my goal should be, you know, I don't want it to go down, but it has gotten easier to me. To me, the most important thing in any. Any business. And look, I don't. I don't. I don't pretend to be an expert or I know it all on anything. And I could be completely wrong about everything I say with you, Scott. Y.
- [04:06]
B
So you. Welcome to the party.
- [04:07]
A
Yeah, exactly. But. But I think the most important number in business is the number of units. In real estate is absolutely the number of units. How many units do I have times the rent is more. The times the number of units. The. We have 14,000 units. Every time that rent goes up 25 bucks, I make $80 million for sure. If it goes up $250, I make 800 million. So every time I move that rent times the number of units, the rent move was not the most important part that will naturally happen over time. It's the number of times I can multiply that or the number of drop ships so the number of hamburgers are sold or, you know, everything except the number of wives.
- [04:54]
B
What program. What. Yeah, what program did that mentality for You. So at what point in your process?
- [05:02]
A
I was a young salesman. I was a young salesman selling car. And quota. You were paid a commission. It was a percentage of the profit. And if you made $4,000, you got 25%. I made $1,000. But if you only do that once every two weeks, it's still only $1,000. I mean, I'd rather make $500 twice a day.
- [05:23]
B
Yeah.
- [05:23]
A
And no money on the third car, by the way. I'd rather make 500 on two cars. No money on two more. Have four a day. Because I got the action and the activity. And I also know I have the relationship. And the number of units, whatever it is. Do you got? Because you get momentum out of it, too. The amount of the score is not as important as how many times I can score consistently because I started getting this euphoria and confidence. The goal gets bigger. Everything gets easier. You know, I'm willing to take more risk. So that's kind of where that came from.
- [05:55]
B
So how do you get to 10,000 then? So you're at. Yeah, a few thousand now, obviously.
- [05:59]
A
Well, I mean, we really started this push in January. Okay. Without a target. January of last year.
- [06:05]
B
Yeah.
- [06:06]
A
So we probably added, you know, I don't know, 1700 pieces last year, all the way from 69 to 108, back down to 92, 82, 72. All attached to a piece of real estate. So I have the real estate and the bitcoin sitting in that real estate account. So I don't need to. I'm not panicking. When this thing drops, I don't like it.
- [06:34]
B
I love it.
- [06:35]
A
But. But what? You like it when it drops.
- [06:38]
B
I want more. I do.
- [06:39]
A
But. But, you know. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm with you. You know. You know, but. But. But I don't like us.
- [06:45]
B
No, there's a good. The number never feels good. Yeah, it never feels good. But. So how do you scale that up to 10,000 units?
- [06:53]
A
Because we'll go. We'll go out and buy another property. We bought a $230 million asset last year. Real. Real estate asset. We added $100 million of Bitcoin to that. So every $230 million deal, basically what I do is I'm buying. My formula is whatever the real estate cost to build less, what I paid is my bitcoin allocation. So if the real estate cost a billion dollars to build it new today and I could buy it for 700 million, I'm gonna fill up that 300 million with Bitcoin. So I'M not stealing a piece of real estate. See, real estate guys wanna. They wanna steal the real estate. It's made on the buy, right? They're like, I'm stealing the real estate. Okay, great. You now you stole the piece of real estate, okay, which is cool, but
- [07:40]
B
now it's a liability.
- [07:41]
A
And now you got to wait for it to somebody to say, I don't want to steal. I want to pay the value. Well, I have plenty of that real estate now. Now what I'm trying to do is combine the thievery, you know, below replacement costs, stack it with something more valuable than a discount. A discount is not that valuable. I can't spend it anywhere. It doesn't go up in value. A discount is a discount. It doesn't provide value for the tenants, the property, or our investors. By taking the discounting, converting the discount to bitcoin, I end up with something that could actually go, you know, parabolic.
- [08:19]
B
Obviously, this is.
- [08:20]
A
And from funds, you have to still have cash flow, right?
- [08:23]
B
So the way to get to 10,000 is buy another piece of property, replicate the same thing, raise more money, buy more property, replicate it.
- [08:30]
A
And I have to raise money. I have. I have to. I have to. I have to either go to a bank, can or Fitzgerald and say, hey, give me $300 million or a billion dollars, or I have to go to go public and sell shares. Or the smart thing for me to do is because I have a big audience that trusts me, I just go to my audience to say, hey, I'll put the deal together, I'll fund the deal, and then you guys backfill it, which is what I'm doing.
- [08:55]
B
So then I'm curious. Obviously, those people are watching the performance of the fund. Yeah, I see bitcoin go up and down, and it's crazy. And we've all been on that roller coaster. So, like, do you get pushback when the price drops?
- [09:06]
A
Well, you know, it's interesting. Nobody's asked me this, and we have probably 15 to 1600 new investors in these real estate, Bitcoin hybrids. None of them are at this conference.
- [09:20]
B
Really?
- [09:21]
A
Zero.
- [09:21]
B
That was one.
- [09:22]
A
None of them know about this conference. None of them know you.
- [09:25]
B
Right.
- [09:26]
A
None of them are going to bitcoin spaces. Okay. They're not bitcoiners. They're real estate investors that want cash flow and are willing to take a. You know, they're willing to take a. A hope note.
- [09:39]
B
Yeah, they're taking. They're taking a flyer on that.
- [09:42]
A
They're like, maybe. Which is exactly what I'M doing. I'm not. This is not a bitcoin pitch. This is a real estate pitch where I have bitcoin attached and I get cash flow and depreciation. And I think if I can build enough of these out, I end up with what the treasury companies were trying to do. But unfortunately the treasury, most of these treasury companies, you know, there's no product, there's no accounts receivables, there's no ledge.
- [10:08]
B
And a lot of things wrong in my life. I got that one right. And you can ask you. I was on a plane with your brother to Vegas and we landed and got pitched seven treasury companies in the first five minutes. And I looked at Gary, I said, this is going to be the bubble of bubbles.
- [10:21]
A
Yeah.
- [10:21]
B
I was like, they're doing nothing. You can't beat bitcoin with bitcoin.
- [10:25]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [10:25]
B
Doesn't have a yield.
- [10:26]
A
Yeah.
- [10:26]
B
Honestly, like an ethereum company Salana. Like, I don't think those assets should be treasury, but you can at least stake them and make 7% and beat the asset.
- [10:34]
A
Yeah.
- [10:35]
B
Bitcoin, you need cash flow. Has to be a business.
- [10:38]
A
There needs to be. You can't take the bitcoin where, where you're. You have a challenge utility already. The world already challenges the utility of it.
- [10:49]
B
Right.
- [10:49]
A
Put it into another company with no utility.
- [10:52]
B
Why do you think that caught such fire?
- [10:54]
A
Because everybody was trying to copy Sailor.
- [10:56]
B
Yeah.
- [10:56]
A
Because every. Michael said everybody should do it and they, they're like, yeah, I should do it. And they thought that they would get big enough, fast enough, you know, and I think people just got, I think people overestimate, underestimated how difficult it really is to scale and they underestimate, you know, the noise on the way down. So what's cool, though, is not one investor of the 1600 investors that watch bitcoin go to, from all the way to 126. Because we weren't even hearing about a myth.
- [11:28]
B
Right.
- [11:28]
A
They weren't calling, you're the genius, bro. Because we had a, our first piece of real estate that, that, that bitcoin probably moved 40% from our entry.
- [11:40]
B
Yeah.
- [11:40]
A
We had the real estate and in 11 months I had a 40% gain in the Bitcoin. You don't have a 40% gain in real estate ever. That doesn't happen.
- [11:49]
B
Yeah.
- [11:50]
A
It's just very gradual over long periods of time. Very boring. They didn't call about the 40% upside and they definitely have not called about the downside because they know the asset we're not selling it Anyway, this is a 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 year play. Maybe we never sell the real estate, right? Just refinance it every seven years, buy more bitcoin, put the two together and build a big real estate.
- [12:13]
B
That's probably the key because it's not like they're watching a chart of the value of the fund on a day to day basis. Like people freak out about the value of your house and I'm like, if you're not going to sell your house, why does it even matter? Like, imagine if you had to watch a chart like bitcoin of your house.
- [12:25]
A
I hate, I hate watching that because I can't do it on my real estate.
- [12:29]
B
You're not going to sell it.
- [12:29]
A
My real estate never has a price on it. I paid $230 million. I know that it was recorded with the city that we paid 230, but it doesn't have. That's not the address of the asset. It's not the value of the asset. The value of that asset is the people that are paying me rent.
- [12:45]
B
Right.
- [12:46]
A
And the location of that asset in the surrounding neighborhood.
- [12:49]
B
I find it really interesting because I would have thought that with the amount of media you got around adding bitcoin to a fund and creating those, that you would have had a whole bunch of bitcoiners flooding your doors. And I know those people wouldn't be upset if it went down because they, if they're a bitcoiner, you've done this.
- [13:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. They already know you have. But you're.
- [13:07]
B
You people that have nothing to do
- [13:08]
A
with people have never owned bitcoin. Okay? These, these are 80% of the people that 1600 investors owned no bitcoin.
- [13:16]
B
Do you think that anyone see it as a catalyst to buy it? Like, do you think that maybe, you know this kind of.
- [13:20]
A
We had some people say, no, dude, I just want to do the real estate and the cash flow. That's all I want to do. I want nothing to do with bitcoin. Very not a lot of people because they said, hey, Grant believes in and I'll do it. Because again, they're still getting the real estate and they're still getting the cash flow. You know. Now the goal last year was to take it public. Okay. And I was very public about it. We were probably August, September, and I'm like, guys, we're going to take this platform public. We came up here, met with eight banks. They were all freaking hyper positive. Let's go. The timing was perfect, blah, blah, blah. Supposedly they're like, oh yeah, you definitely want to be a Treasury company. I said no, I do not want to be called the treasury company. This is before they failed. Okay. I said, I definitely, I know there will be a day when the word treasury company will be.
- [14:01]
B
It's like a four letter word, like,
- [14:03]
A
you know, like an estate. So and, and here we are today, right? You would not want to do that and we wouldn't probably want to be public today. We're also looking at the possibility of, of staying private with Cardone capital and actually tokenizing the real estate and the bitcoin portion of the asset.
- [14:22]
B
Talk about that.
- [14:23]
A
There's on that deal. There's. The deal was 230 for the real estate. Three. A total of 330 with the Bitcoin. I have about 100 just for rounding things up. $130 million worth of debt. We obviously would not. This debt is five year debt.
- [14:37]
B
Right.
- [14:38]
A
Five year fixed, 5% money. Cheap money. Okay, so I have 230 million because I'm not going to tokenize it, but I got 230, $130 million worth of real estate and $100 million worth of Bitcoin. We would put let's say 230 million tokens a dollar each. I, I just got to understand the security portion of this and also the accounting portion. My guy Ryan's telling me that I'm gonna have to do 1099 on every one of these people. I'm like, bro, that, that's not possible. Okay, you're gonna have one token. Let's say if we got down to $1 tokens could be traded five times in one day. How can I possibly keep up with that?
- [15:22]
B
That's been a huge debate with all the clarity act and genius act and all of that. Because it's literally impossible. Like they were floating that in the last administration that wallet providers and miners and everybody. Like you can't, you literally can't. They might not even be in the United States to 1099 anyways. And it's a free market, right?
- [15:40]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I don't know how to do a 1099 in Singapore.
- [15:42]
B
But it's interesting though because I've had similar thoughts with like taking a media company public via blockchain and you own shares.
- [15:49]
A
Yeah. And I think it's cool, dude. I think more companies should be able to do that. I think that, you know, the accredited. We've raised $2 billion from our audience. We've, we've raised a lot of money for my. So my influence My social media following and I can just tell you that the laws in this country are terrible for the non accredited investor. The non accredited investor who needs to be able to invest in these real estate assets. We're buying best in class real estate as good as you can buy. The biggest institutions in the world sell it to us. Like this has typically been held for the wealthiest families in the world. And we're buying those and then saying democratizing him with my audience. Well, if you're non accredited and if
- [16:30]
B
your niece, the bulk of your audience has to be non accredited. Right. Just by numbers. Just by numbers.
- [16:36]
A
98% of America is non accredited. Which who needs the best, the better investments? And let's say it's a valedictorian, got a finance degree, decided to go into nursing because that's where her passion was. She's never going to make more than 80 grand a year. She's not qualified to invest even though she's highly intelligent. I got another guy over here. He's. He inherited $2 million. He supposedly knows what he's doing. He's a total idiot. Completely, you know, like void of any kind of common sense. It's not fair, dude, it's not okay that the, the $60,000 employee needs that investment. They could go get a tattoo. They could spend $1 billion on tattoos.
- [17:23]
B
Lottery.
- [17:23]
A
They could do the lottery. A billion, a billion. $108 billion a year is wasted on lottery tickets and tattoos. They can go into any casino in America and spend their last 1500 bucks non accredited. But when I want to invest in a private company, all of a sudden the government gets involved and says, we want to protect you.
- [17:44]
B
What's the answer? I mean, obviously stay out of it.
- [17:47]
A
Stay out of it.
- [17:47]
B
Yeah. The obvious answer is let people do what they want. But the next tier is maybe like a test, you know, like some sort of a financial literacy test you can study for. I don't know.
- [17:58]
A
Then everybody should have to take the financial literacy test. Everybody should have to take it, including the wealthy people. The amount of money you have does not. I know a lot of wealthy people. Like, it doesn't mean they're more intelligent now. They're not the go to people. They're not always the person I go to. I'd rather talk to somebody in their family office that is really the intelligent person. So anyway, I just wish they would get out of the way. If you let me put a tattoo on my arm, okay. If you let me have sex or if you let me chop off parts of my body. That's okay to do, dude, stay out of my money. Let me invest. If I want to invest my last thousand dollars with you, I should be able to do it.
- [18:37]
B
I agree. And if you had it tokenized, then it's way below the accredited investor threshold and people are going to do whatever they want.
- [18:43]
A
Now it's broken.
- [18:43]
B
I'm sorry. You lose and then they, they go lose their 50 bucks if it goes bad. I'm sorry. That's fine.
- [18:48]
A
Yeah, you're going to lose $50 in your lifetime. Okay. The problem is you're not. Most people never earn enough money. The problem is not people get ripped off. Most people never get ripped off. The biggest problem in this country is people rip themselves off because they don't work hard enough to earn enough money to have anything to get ripped off for.
- [19:06]
B
And that divide is only growing. The haven't have nots has never been kind of more.
- [19:10]
A
It's going to get bigger and bigger, but it shouldn't be. It should be getting smaller and smaller, not bigger and bigger. Because the opportunity to earn money today is never been bigger, better or easier than it is right now.
- [19:22]
B
What do you think your fund would look like if there was no accredited investor law? Right. You've raised $2 billion. How much you think you would have raised if those didn't exist?
- [19:30]
A
I don't know that I would have raised any more money. I don't think I would have raised more money, actually. Okay, so this is not a argument I'm trying to have for me.
- [19:37]
B
No, I didn't mean it that way.
- [19:38]
A
The fastest. No, I know you didn't, but the fastest way to raise money is from accredited for people with big checks.
- [19:44]
B
Right.
- [19:45]
A
And our average checks about 500 grand, maybe a little over $500,000. The non accredited money just doesn't come in.
- [19:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, you literally need like 10,000 people to give you 50 bucks just to get that one check. Right? So yeah, yeah.
- [20:01]
A
And the paperwork. The paperwork's the problem. The amount of paperwork somebody has to sign to do a deal with me and then I got to go do all this bullshit checking and like I have to go through, I got to be sure everything's handled and, you know, which is fine. I mean, it's allowed me to scale my business, but it is a tremendous amount of work. And anybody that tries to scale, particularly real estate, if you're going to go try to do this in real estate the way I have, and you guys think, oh, Grant Cardone's making so much money because he's raising money from other people. Yeah, yeah, dude. In the beginning you're not going to make any money. You're going to lose money. When you go, you go raise 50 grand, you get paid 1% of 50 grand, you got paid 500 bucks. Okay, you're legal, just legal on that document will be probably $90,000. You got a lot of those deals. So you either got to get really big, really fast. I'm not trying to talk anybody out of it now. Now adding bitcoin to the mix gives me and our investors an explosive upside. But, but more than that, I mean the big, the real play for me with the real estate bitcoin hybrid is I'm going to create, I believe I'll create him as an animal here, a new financial asset over time. Not today, not tomorrow, not next month, but over time, the real estate and the bitcoin combined is going to become a bit of a biological kind of transformation financial vehicle. Because the REITs that I compete with can never do this. They can never ever create this entity. So I found a little hack in the system, a little crack, a little fissure where the two, the two, these four trillion dollar guys, the Blackstones, the, all the REITs, there's 190 of the REITs can never ever. This is my perfect moat. They can never do this. Number two, the syndicators that I compete with, other guys that are trying to do what I do, high net worth families. Because of the fall in bitcoin in the last three weeks, they were starting to look at what I was doing. Everybody knows they've heard about it. There's been a lot of press about it. They were like, I'm gonna go, let's go play on the cardone. The, the hybrid bitcoin real estate thing. I like it. And then they saw this thing fall apart, dude, they're like, yeah, that, that's a bad idea. So, so I think I'm gonna have at least two or three years to build this out. Put 10,000.
- [22:30]
B
So yeah, I know you got to go and get on stage. What's the timeline to 10,000 if you don't move?
- [22:35]
A
I mean, if I can do that, I think I can do that in
- [22:37]
B
two or three years. 10,000 bitcoins, I think I can do
- [22:41]
A
that in two or three years. If I could go public and, or tokenize this year, which is the target, I could get there by next, but I could get there by the end of this year.
- [22:50]
B
Hope you do it. And I hope we go up to 500,000 right afterwards. Dude.
- [22:54]
A
I hope it does too, bro.
- [22:55]
B
Right.
- [22:56]
A
Because this is, this is the way as a, as a real estate syndicator. Real estate syndicators really don't make that much money. And I know it looks good on paper, but we have never taken a promote on the deal. I have 47 deals. I have never, ever sold a deal to get my promote, ever. Most fund managers have a three year life. They want to out three years because they want to get their little 20%. I've never even taken a promote because I want to keep the real estate long term. I want to build this massive portfolio. And. But with the bitcoin, okay, that Bitcoin, 2000 Bitcoin goes to $1 million tomorrow. Guarantee you I'm going to sell that bitcoin. I'm going to pick up $200 million. I get, I get my promote out of that. My investors get it and we still own the real estate. I don't have to start from zero.
- [23:43]
B
Yeah.
- [23:43]
A
And then I'll go just, you know, start the game again.
- [23:47]
B
Dip is good, man. I'm telling you. Hurts, but it's good. Now you gotta go get on stage, man. Thank you, Grant.