Grant Cardone on Why College is a Bad Investment for Most | Real Talk

Are Americans being shamed for their success? Why are failure, apathy, and victimhood in vogue? Very few people are as bold as Grant Cardone about his success. He earned it, from a car salesman to a millionaire in just five years. He says that anyone can achieve success in America with the right mindset and work ethic. Want to feel like nothing can stop you from reaching your goals? Listen in. Hi. Hello. Grant, I'm so glad to have you on. I find your work to be fascinating. We have actually a lot in common. I think we're both professional troublemakers. Yeah. I usually call myself a professional troublemaker, but I think I found a kindred spirit. 100%. You know, we need more people like us. Tell me a little bit about your background and how did you become who you are? I grew up in Louisiana. My dad died when I was 10. Probably, you know, what part of made me, I'm in Louisiana, you know, got bayous around me and the woods and guns. And this is 1968 and my dad passes, raised by a single mom. I have five, there was five of the kids living in a 1,400 square foot house with no income. So, you know, I learned a lot about money between the age of 10 and 15 years old, watching my mom suffer, no income, worried that everybody was going to take advantage of her. She was financially not prepared. Is a nice way to say it. My dad took care of everything and the, you know, the money earner was gone. And so I learned right away, you need to have income that lives, outlives your body and your ability to produce. A house is a terrible investment. Even though my dad had bought a dream house in Lake Charles, great location, but when he died, we could no longer fund that house. So I learned at 13 years old, a house is not a good deal. Dividends are not enough to depend on social security and unemployment. Again, this is before they were in trouble and they're all in trouble now. That wasn't working. The education that I was getting was slow, boring. It wasn't conducive to my energy. And, you know, I wanted to learn how to take care of my mom as fast as I could, but the school system wasn't teaching me that. So I became troubled, you know, when a kid's bored, particularly a young male, 12, 13 years old, a lot of energy is bored. They're going to cause trouble. So unfortunately it was destructive from 15 to 25. It was very destructive because a drug dealer got a hold on me. And when other men wouldn't mentor me without a dad, my uncles didn't step in. The drug dealer did, got a hold on me. I'm not blaming him. I'm responsible for what happened. But for the next 10 years, I would lose my life to drugs. And 25, I cleaned up. And then I went back to that, my true ambition, which was to take care of my mom and get my money right and be a productive member of society. What pulled you out of that life of mess and trouble? Well, drugs are one thing, but, you know, the self-deprivation and the self-esteem and the looking at yourself in the mirror every day, saying you are a loser. Like the disgust that every drug addict has looking at themselves, knowing who they truly are, because they're not that. I was not that. To look at myself in the mirror every day and see me losing myself and my self-respect was so painful. For 10 years, whatever that is, 3,600 days of looking in the mirror, saying I'm a piece of garbage, I hate myself, I'm not living up to what my potential is. Because prior to that, I was a good kid, right? I just was bored. So I cleaned it up. You know, when people started dropping out of my life, my mom said, I'm out. I don't want any more of you. When she quit enabling me and my sisters and my brother said, I'm tapping out. When I lost enough people, then I immediately went and got help. And what was the first thing that you did that led you into the path of success? Well, when I got back from the treatment center, I got a job. That's kind of an important thing. Well, I got a job doing the only thing. The only people that would hire me was a car dealer. So he says, look, we'll take you back. And he gave me a shot. He's like, you mess this up one time, you're out of here forever. No one would hire me. I'd lost seven jobs between sophomore and high school through college, seven jobs in a row. At least you tried to have a job. I mean, so many kids these days in high school don't even think about having a job. Yeah, but you couldn't get credit for that then because everybody, all the kids had jobs back then. I had a McDonald's job, lost it. I had a refinery job, lost it. Like I got, I lost every job. Shoe salesman lost that job. And I had lost basically the respect of the community. Nobody wanted to touch me. I was the kid, the Cardone boy that was trouble. Car dealer hires me back. I hated sales. I hated car sales. I hated the way people treated me, but I didn't have any options. And so I decided, 25 years old, I'm like, I am going to throw myself into this job. I'm going to learn how to do what I don't like to do. I'm going to excel at this job. And I'm going to help other people. I'm either going to get good at my job or I'm going to spend my time making sure other kids like me don't get on drugs. And that's all I did for the next three years. I either worked on learning sales, which I hated or kind of ironic. I was going to a meeting to help kids to tell my story about drugs and how they had, how they had been terrible for me. And what's crazy is when I leaned into the thing that I hated the most, I would end up writing bestselling sales books. We have, we're considered the largest sales training company in the world today. Like the very thing I hated that I resisted. When I leaned into it, it was actually the gift. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Do you think people are naturally born to be good at sales or is it something they learn? I mean, I just feel like you have this like charisma in you that you must have always. Thank you. And you do too, by the way. So game recognizes game, but my game, my game was developed. So I was an introvert, couldn't speak to people. Literally couldn't like, couldn't craft a message. Didn't know how to hold people's attention. Very awkward. It was developed. It's all developed. Like you're not, there's no such thing as a natural born speaker, natural born salesperson, natural born athlete. Even if you were, LeBron has to practice his skills. All these greats, the Tiger Woods, the Jordans, the Kobe's, the LeBron's, the Brady's, they all have unbelievable discipline committed to their craft. Or they're those passing talents, right? You're very talented for a short period of time. I've been doing this now for, what am I, 65? So 40 years. Successfully moving from one industry to another one, to another one. That doesn't happen by accident. Because you could burn in one trick pony, you know, and there's a lot of tricks. If you just keep developing and keep learning, keep being interested. That's why I'm so fascinated by what you guys do at PragerU for kids, parents, you got to learn something new. Yeah. You know, the other thing we have in common is this appreciation of adversity. I mean, you talk about your childhood and how hard it was. Legitimately, you had a very, very, you were not a privileged kid, right? Well, I certainly had what's called white privilege because I was white. Yeah. So. Well, is it? Whatever that means. I'm sure, I'm sure when I went to get a loan at a bank, I had an advantage over a young black kid in Louisiana in 1983, without a doubt. Like I will give all my black friends credit. Hey, 100%. I am going to get looked at different. I believe that to be true. But my financial statement is not black or white or brown. It is what it is. Do I pay people back? Do I earn enough money? Do I spend less than I earn? What am I doing with my assets? What is my business plan for growth? The profit and loss statement is not, does not have color. The individual does. And the person that's going to give me the loan or not give me the loan, certainly they have some built-in, I'm sure, prejudice. But at the end of the day, you know, if my financial statement, if I'm a white kid or 25 years old or 35 years old, and I can't pay the bills, I'm not getting the loan. I'm not going to get the break. If I can't make the sales pitch, I'm not going to get the break. If I'm a great talent, regardless of color, and my pitch is terrible, I'm not going to get the sale. Sure. I mean, I would imagine also that just these, the adversity that you went through just toughened you up. And you just, every time you stumble, you probably, I imagine every time you fall down, you just get up right away and you just keep going. Right? Yeah. Because I mean, like, I have never, literally never had a break, even today. So today, like, we joke at my office, I'm waiting for my break. When am I going to get my break? Because we don't get breaks. We make them. And I'm doing something right now at Cardone Capital. We've raised a billion dollars, almost $5 billion worth of real estate. I'm competing in a market where JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, these are massive, massive institutions that have hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, institutional, that I'm pushing up against. You push up against the schools, okay? I'm pushing up against monster, institutional, monetary machines. And I'm actually competing with them. I showed you that thing we're buying in Chicago right now. Some of the assets that we bought are typically only owned by MetLife or New York Life or all state of state for them. And we're buying them and democratizing them amongst regular everyday families. The guys producing this right now are able to invest alongside me in an institutional quality asset typically owned by the biggest banks or machines in the world. You talk about sales, which is a matter of tenacity and just getting better at it. And you also talk about your other, I guess, secret sauce, but not so secret, is marketing. We have that in common, by the way. PragerU doesn't believe in just making great products. We will never make something that we don't have funding to actually promote. I used to use this analogy, what's the point of buying this fancy car if you never put gasoline in it? Nobody will ever see it, right? Talk to me a little bit about your marketing strategy. Well, we are monster marketers. Anybody that follows me, we'll see. All you got to do is go to Google search Grant Cardone one time, and then you'll see the rest of the machine take place. So anywhere you're going to go on the internet after that, I'm going to find you. So we have an email campaign, about 5 million, Jared? 5 million people on an email list. We sent out 400 million emails to 5 million people last year. So if you want off the list, get off the list. It doesn't matter. You get off the list, I'm still going to find you on Instagram. I'm going to find you on YouTube. You're going to see me on TikTok. You're going to see me here at PragerU. You're going to see me at a conference. You're going to see me at the Milken Institute. There's no way to get away from somebody that's completely committed to marketing. I did not know this until I was 51 years old. We did not start marketing. I had been in business for 26 years before I recognized marketing to be senior to sales. It is the most important thing a company does. It is the number one, probably number two and number three, most important role the CEO should have of every company. How do I market? How am I branded? When people think about other people, why don't they think about me? We do a lot of crazy marketing stuff to get people's attention and to keep their attention. It's interesting because in the world of information, PragerU, we're kind of a different kind of beast. I don't know how to exactly characterize what we do, but we're somewhat similar to some of the think tanks. I remember when we started PragerU about 13 years ago, it started in my kitchen. I'm not a garage person. I started in the kitchen. It's the best place to be. I remember saying that we have to put money behind our ideas. Good ideas deserve a marketing investment. And people would say to me, well, but if you make great content, people will find you. And I would say, no, no, no, no. I need to go and find the people. We need to market good ideas. Otherwise, bad ideas will be marketed. And this is so similar to what you guys do as well. You got to put your ego at the door and actually meet people where they're at, right? Yeah, content is not king. I hear this all the time. Content is king. Your content is going to be replaced by somebody else's content microseconds after you drop your content. It's the distribution of the content. So if you study a company like Starbucks, it has no ad program. They spend no money in advertising. And when I'm talking about marketing, I'm not talking about advertising. So Starbucks claims we spend no money in advertising. But if you look at their locations, their locations are their advertising. Wells Fargo does it. Bank of America does it. All big institutions do it. Wells Fargo, they're like, look, you can trust us. Why? Because I see you everywhere. So when we started studying these models, we're like, okay, for people to really gain trust, it's not that you exchange value with the customer or tell them the truth. Yeah, those things are very, very important. Because if you don't exchange value and tell people the truth, they're never going to buy from you a second time. The ultimate way to build trust is through consistency with viewership, that I'm going to show up day after day. People don't even, 50% of the audience that meets me doesn't even like me the first time. By a survey, by the way, okay, almost 50% is like, I do not like his delivery. I don't like the way he talks. I don't like his unabashed, unapologetic claim that he's created wealth for himself. I don't like any of the jet, the cars, homeschooling the kids, like my opinions on politics and COVID, blah, blah, blah. They don't like that. Well, okay, that's fine. But that idea that first impression is the most important is not true. This is an old, old idea. The last impression, and by the way, all impressions can be changed over time. My wife didn't want anything to do with me, okay? Okay, nothing, zero. But after 26 phone calls, she gave me a shot. We've been married 20 years now. So same thing with the customer. Just because you don't like my appearance or judge me, or I didn't quite fit in some little box, frequency of delivery of a marketing message over long periods of time can change people's mind. Wow, that's so interesting that you bring it up because I was going to bring up with you this fact that when people Google you, they may not like you, but you've mentioned that. And so I want to lean into that and understand that a little better. So our education- Love my haters, love my haters. Good, so we can be totally real here. So I think that if you follow the narrative of our education system, in our culture, in our society right now, if you're wealthy and successful, they'll say that you're basically a bad guy. But you're not only wealthy and successful, you're wealthy, successful, and you're showy about it. I looked at your Instagram page. There are pictures of your homes and your jet and your car. You're pretty unapologetic about your success. I think it's very interesting. Talk to me a little bit about that. Well, number one, the number one reason we do that, okay, and there's some other reasons we do it that I'm happy to share with people because I'm completely transparent. Nobody's ever going to bust me about or criticize me about something I don't already know. So all the critics that have whatever they have to say about me, I'm like, I already know that about me. Like, I don't even know what you're telling me. Yeah, know yourself. I know that. So the number one reason I show off the stuff is because nobody would show me the stuff when I was 10 years old. When I lost my dad, my dad had bought a really nice house a year and a half before he died. He had made it in the best neighborhood in Lake Charles, Louisiana. We had a view of the lake. It was fantastic. It was, he made it. So he was surrounded now by other people that had made it. And when he died, they didn't bring me in and show me how they made it. And I was frustrated by this. My uncle, three uncles I had, one of them made it extremely well. He was not just a worker, but he was an investor and he did extremely well. He didn't bring me in and say, hey, let me show you how I made it. When I went to school, I was looking for one of these teachers to show me how they made it. And they didn't. Nobody showed me. You know, the rich, when they get rich today, what they do is they go into hiding. And I understand why they do. Okay. Because if Jeff Bezos showed us his 300 foot yacht and the 200 foot yacht that supports it, he has two boats, not one. While he spends three months in the Mediterranean. If he showed us that we would just, people would hate on him more. So I just promised myself and my wife agrees with this is if we ever made it and some of what I've done, like I never even dreamed what happened for me. But if we ever made it, I am not going to not share that with people and show it to them. So the number one reason is this because I didn't get to see it as a kid. I want to show people and inspire them. I don't have a basketball career. I know if I was a baseball player, I would show how to make the swing or make the pitch. Or if I was a rapper, I'd show off my chain and show off my golden or platinum albums in business. If you sell a billion dollars of products and you tell people, I've done a billion dollars over the internet. I've raised another $1 billion. We have 160,000 customers that pay us every year. If I start showing that off and talking about that or showing off, I'm condemned. But if you were a rapper, a ball player, an Olympic athlete, you would show off your medals. Right. So the second reason we do it is because it markets. People, I'm competing with nudity on the internet, car wrecks, foodie videos that are like so compelling to watch. Like I watch these foodie videos. You have the chocolates right here. They grab people's attention. I'm competing with all that for attention. So you throw in a $70 million plane and I'm getting on it. All of a sudden people are like, what's that really is? What is that? How much does that cost? How did he get that? And some of that is because I've always been inspired by other people's success. I have never envied what other people have done. Whether it was the big house. Wow. Who lives here? As soon as I walked in this house, who lives here? Who bought this? What did they do? I'm still inspired by it. The private jet. I'm inspired. Who did that? So I don't hate on stuff. Some people do. And the last reason we do it is because the haters are so predictable and they're so dependable. I want everybody to understand like they're predictable. All you got to do is drop something for them to hate on. And they are predictably. They will comment. They will share. And they will spread your message better than the people that support you. So I love my haters. I would not be where I'm at without my haters. So it's like that attention basically fuels your enterprise. 100%. Without them, we would have to spend probably three times the money in advertising. Yeah. Oh, I can relate to this. 553 hit pieces on PragerU this summer alone. From the New York Times to The Guardian. And actually, they just hate. They don't have anything substantial to say. It's hard to... It's actually hard to condemn us for anything real, but they love to hate us. And that's just the environment we're in. So I guess it's free media, right? It's free media. Because the only thing people will remember three years after that, whatever they wrote, is PragerU. Right, the actual brand. They will remember nothing else except PragerU. Okay. So you guys that hate on us, please. Yeah. Go do it. Click video on me. Right. I don't like... Make a commentary on the video. Yeah, exactly. Lie about me, whatever you want to do. We pick up so much press like that. Yeah. Oh, you're strong. Love my haters. Yeah. All right. So here's another. I have a list of controversial stuff that would get us in trouble. You say that one should not own the house that they live in. Can you explain that? Homes are a terrible, terrible investment. But the American dream is to own a house and a white picket fence and a dog. But those people didn't do the math. If you do the math on a house, it's really never paid an investment. Warren Buffett owns one home. He has never in any of his millions of interviews ever attributed his wealth to a home. Elon Musk, richest man in the world, owns zero homes. Now, there are some rich people out there that own a bunch of homes. Larry Ellison owns 13 homes. They're all in stupid, ridiculous trophy locations around the world. But he never attributes his wealth creation from a home. It's from businesses. Owning a business, running a business, growing a business, contributing to a business is what creates wealth, not a house. But who benefited from the homes? The banks did. Okay. Banks are making 7% to 8% every year that you own a home. So over 30 years, just interest, you would have to make 240%. A 240% gain on that house just in the interest. You'd have to make another, like in Florida, we pay a 2% property tax here in Golden Beach. So if I own the home 30 years, I would have to make another 60% just to fund the property taxes. I haven't paid insurance, maintenance of the roof. Now, the audience is going to say, but where am I going to live? You're going to rent. You're going to rent where you live, and you're going to take the money that you would normally use to buy a house, and you're going to use that to build yourself, build your business, or invest in other real estate that pays you income. A house is a terrible, terrible investment, and I own two of them. So people think that their residence is their asset. And I know that you and Robert Kiyosaki is another good friend of mine say, your residence is actually not your asset. It's your liability. And I know you kind of explained this, but I want to actually dive deeper into this, because it's something so contradictory to what people think about and hear about all the time. You get all kinds of tax breaks when you buy your first home, depending on what state. You get limited tax breaks, very limited. So dive into this further, because I think it is so crucial for financial literacy, for people to understand that. Well, let me confront the financial literacy issue. We are financially indoctrinated. We are not illiterate. Basically, you're taught how to play. When you go to Las Vegas, they have a book, How to Play Blackjack, How to Play Craps. These books are written knowing the more confident you are about how to play the game, the longer you will play the game. The banks have, with the help of the education system and the media, have indoctrinated America on what they want us to spend money on. Breakfast is the breakfast of champions, and that's the most important meal of the day, and buy a house and save your money and get an IRA account and go to college. Well, we're going to get into that one in a minute. All these things are myths. These things are played by the book. These are programming people, like put on the mask, get a shot, very similar programming. Buy a house is a liability. It should not be on your net worth statement as an asset, but as a liability, because you have to replace it. If you sell it today, you're going to have to replace it with another place to live, which is going to cost you money. So what? When I go to a hospital, if I have to go to the hospital, I want to get in and get out as fast as possible. I don't buy the hospital. If I go to Whole Foods, I don't buy Whole Foods. I go in there, get my food. I don't buy a farm to feed myself. I rent the food, use it, and go back and get it again. Same thing with where you live. People should use the place they live, pay for the use of the place, take all the other money, invest in yourself. That's an asset. Can't steal it from me. Can't be depreciated. Invest in the business, much better return investing in my business than in a house. I can make 100% of my money in a year. I'll never make that on a house. In any market, that will never happen. And the third thing people should invest in is real estate, which I love, real estate, that has cash flow and tenants in the properties. That comes with the maximum number of tax benefits, passive income that people need forever, and big, big depreciation, as well as long-term appreciation. Do you think that there is an emotional, and maybe it's part of the brainwashing, but I feel like there's some emotional tie to owning a place that you live in? Yeah. Hey, the Cardones live here. I get to put my little mat there. I get to put my furniture in a place. But you can do that. Some of the apartments that are being built today, some of the apartments we own, the pools, two or $3 million, the theaters, half a million dollars, the security, got $400,000 security systems, great places to park, concierge. Apartment living today is not what it was. When I was growing up, where poor people were the only people that rented. Today, the wealthy are going to use, they're going to move, they're going to be mobile, they're going to travel. Millennials don't want to own homes today. Homes going forward over the next 30 years will prove to be an even worse investment than the last 30 years. Wow. Fascinating. Yeah. But you would still invest in real estate. Oh, 100%. Like I said, I own two homes, terrible investments. I bought them. I got emotional about them. I think I'm going to make money on them. They're in trophy locations. One's down the street from right here. I think I'm going to make money, but they're a headache. I got to maintain them. I got to fix them. I want to rehab them. I got my own ideas about them. Takes a tremendous amount of energy. And I'm stuck in that location for periods of time. Like if the market goes bad and I want to move, I can't because I got this thing anchoring me down. Okay. So my advice to all young people, never buy a home, ever. Wow. Until you're super wealthy, then you buy a home. Till then, invest in yourself, invest in your business, and invest in real estate to cash flows. Okay. So you talk about invest in yourself. I think young people are hearing that part of investing in themselves means going to college. Yeah. So let's talk about that. You did go to college. I did. I have two degrees. Wow. What are your degrees in? I have education and I have an MBA in non-profit management. And obviously, I went to UCLA. I studied business economics. You know, I have a collection. And now you're doing media. And now I'm like, now I'm talking to everybody about how they should not go to college because these colleges are just a game of loans. Is that the consensus? For me? No, from the people you're talking to. You know, so who are the people that I'm talking to? Many of the people that I talk to are parents who really have to put so much of their life savings aside in order to get their kids into these schools that the kids graduate from these schools and they can't even get a job. The other people that I talk to are people like you who are CEOs and people who run businesses who agree with me that actually the colleges are screwing up our kids' minds. And when we want to hire these employees that are coming out of these nurseries or left-wing indoctrination centers, we actually have an unemployable workforce, right? And so it's actually, it's almost like a deficit to their brain. Now, I'm not saying that every single college is a problem or that every degree is useless. I'm not, you know, not an extremist, but I think that there are many, many degrees and many, many colleges that are actually, it's like playing Russian roulette with your kids' brains. And for America, I think it's playing Russian roulette with the workforce that we're going to go and inherit. I mean, getting a degree in balloon blowing is ridiculous. Well, there's a lot of that going on. So I know I'm interviewing you. There are a lot of balloons in college right now. A lot of ballooning. You know, I went to college. I spent five years there. I got a good degree, accounting degree. I would never, ever do that again, ever. It would be one of the things I would avoid doing at all costs, regardless. I mean, unless I wanted to go to Wall Street, even then, I don't think I would do it. To be a brain surgeon, yeah, maybe so, okay? But I mean, I don't know that I'd want to be a brain surgeon because they're not paid that well today. To be a rocket scientist, probably need some kind of degree. I don't know that I need to, I don't know that Elon cares that I went to college. I think he just wants to know that I can move a rocket to Mars and he would hire me. Google, Facebook, and many of the banks are now saying, you don't need a college degree to work here. This is an old, old idea. Play by our rules, house rules, go to college. This is the highest inflated single commodity in America today. It's like 2,200% inflated, way past homes. I mean, if you want to make a good investment, you know, invest in the colleges, not in college student housing, but in the college itself, you'd have made a fortune. So I would never go to college because one, I don't get paid to go there. And when you're 17, 18 years old, you need income and you need job experience. You get no job experience in college, zero. You don't know how to show up on time. You actually get to not show up at all. The worst things I've learned in my life were learned either in high school and college. All the bad habits I ever created as a young man, I learned from my peers in high school and college. The fact that I walked out with $40,000 of debt to today would be more like 120 to $160,000 in debt. And I didn't earn five years of income. That'd be another 150 to 200,000. College costs the average kid about 350 to $400,000 when you include the loss of income and the debt required to do it. Two, create someone that does not know how to communicate, can't write a resume, can't write an email, really, knows nothing about marketing, nothing about finance, and walks out and believes that they're entitled to a job, and they're not. And AI, last thing is, AI is going to destroy colleges in America. Are a lot of your friends that run businesses seeing the same thing? Yeah, we have 700 employees. We never, I have never given one ounce of plus points because somebody went to college. It means nothing to me. Even at the executive level, it means nothing. You went to Harvard, okay, so what? Who do you know? That's the only reason I would send my kids to Harvard, by the way. For networking. I'm like, well, who'd you meet there? Do you know the Obamas? Do you know the Bushes? The only reason to go to Harvard is that. Can I ask you about your girls a little bit? Your girls are not in school anymore, right? You're homeschooling them. Yeah, we took them out five or six years ago. Okay, so growing up, I don't know if it was the same case for you. I used to hear that if you don't send your kids to a government school or something, they're not gonna learn how to socialize. I'm gonna go on a little rant here because I'm curious about your reaction to this. There's this saying, jack of all trades, master of none. People oftentimes forget the last part, which is better than a master of one. I see this in the medical field. I think that doctors that are so hyper-focused only on one part of your body will ignore other pieces of your body and it's really dangerous. You see this, by the way, in education. My background is in education and there used to be this thing that we were told to tell parents to have kids only participate in one sport per semester because I don't know why. They should focus in on one thing, which never made any sense to me, especially now as a parent. I actually think the more sports my kids do, the better, right? And also as an employer, at Prager, you have about 150 employees. I've realized that the employees that actually have multiple, the kids, right, that have multiple abilities and also access to being able to be outside of a box and being able to do multiple things, it's actually more fun. It's more rewarding for them, but it's not just more fun. They're smarter. They're better critical thinkers. There is an assembly line that is created in the education system that makes you think like only a master of one. And I think it's actually problematic. And when you look at homeschool kids, they're forced to have multiple skillsets. They're forced to integrate. They're encouraged to integrate and synthesize. We have many employees that were homeschooled and this whole idea that if you don't go to a government school or a private school of some sort, you're gonna be awkward or you're not gonna learn enough. It's actually like this whole concept now is shattered in my opinion. And just, I want your reaction on this. Jack of all trades or no? You know, I definitely don't wanna be a master of just one trade because that trade is gonna, sooner or later you're gonna be older than the trade. I mean, ask Tom Brady, master of quarterback, but he's at the end now and he's gonna have to figure out how to be other things. Everybody has to become something else. Your industry is either gonna be destroyed. Your product line is gonna be here. The skillset you got in college is going to go away at some point. We just can't keep up with technology. So on the homeschooling thing, if people wanna know, my sister said, cause she was a teacher. Oh my God, the kids aren't gonna be socialized. I said, exactly. I don't want them socialized by these idiots. I don't want them with your kids. I don't want them with the teachers. I don't want them in the system and I don't want them involved with the government. Anything the government touches, I don't want to be involved with. I don't do government housing, nothing. I don't wanna pay the IRS. If I can figure out how not to pay the federal government money, I don't wanna pay them. I don't mind paying my state where I have businesses and real estate, but I don't wanna fund all these crazy activities. And the last thing I want is the government involved in my kids' education or some strange teacher or your strange kids. Until I approve of your kids, I don't want your kids around my kids. So we pulled them out. The biggest benefit of homeschooling is, first of all, it is the most unbelievable thing for a relationship between the father and the children and the mother and the children because now we have time with them. I'm not delegating the activity to somebody else to take care of my kids. Number two, it's not as hard as people think it is. We thought, oh my God, this is gonna be hard. I'm gonna have to be doing math and geography with the kids. I know I get lost in all that stuff. And I definitely don't want my wife doing math with Sabrina and Scarlett, okay? What are they gonna learn? Because she counts on her fingers. You both work a lot, right? We work a lot, right? How do you do it? But we can, because we created our life around this. All the businesses that we have support us homeschooling our children. Our kids work in our company, have since they were six years old. We don't pay them an allowance, okay? We give them a contract. We pay them a salary. You give your children a contract. Do they have to sign it? They have to sign the contract, okay? They agree to everything on the contract. They have to speak in front of audiences. They have to meet customers. They have to call customers. Like if you see my kids, you will understand that not having kids in the school system actually makes them more social. Now, the downside is they're not part of the varsity team. They're not gonna be cheerleaders. They're gonna miss all that. They're probably not gonna learn how to drink and drug with your kids. They're not gonna become addicted to TikTok. Well, that's still on us. We still have to handle the phones, right? But they're not gonna be seeing TikTok on the phones. And they're gonna get through the school system faster. So I told my kids, I said, look, this school thing is 12 years. Do it in six. Do it in eight. You should be out of high school at the age of 14 or 15 years old. There's no reason to be 18 when you do this. You're young, you're vibrant. Just get through it, man. My mom used to tell me, if you're going through hell, run. That's what high school is. Get through it as fast as you can. And so I would tell everybody out there, single mom, you're a single mom, you're working your butt off. And you're like, there's no way I could homeschool, but I'm interested in it. I promise you, you can do it. Work with your employer to say, I wanna homeschool my kids. I need another something a year for the transportation or the nanny or whatever I need so that I don't have to drive these kids back and forth to school and end up with problems when they're 15 or 16 years old. Wow, amazing. Use PragerU. Oh, use PragerU. I mean, that's exactly what we're trying to do. People have been told that they cannot educate their kids because they don't have a master's in education. My brother got an, his kids are in the system and he got an email saying, agree that your kids will not use AI. You have to sign off on it. And he sent it to me. I'm like, oh, wow. I hired a person to teach our kids how to use AI. The same day. Why wouldn't you use it? It's a new technology. Yeah, completely. When did you stop trusting the big behemoth institutions? Is it something that happened since, I call it the lockdowns. I don't use the C word because it triggers. Yeah, triggers the audience or triggers algorithms. Triggers me because I just think it was such BS. I didn't trust the system but when I was 10 years old, 50, 55 years ago, I'm like, okay, all this is broken. What my dad thought to be true is not real. The middle-class is a broken class of people. The middle-class, basically, the whole structure around America, this, we have the largest middle-class in the world. We're the richest country in the world. We're free here. There's nobody free here in this country. These are, this propaganda perpetuated onto the American public to, we're the greatest country in the world. Maybe, but maybe you hadn't traveled either. Okay, our food system sucks. Our education sucks. Our hospitals suck. Bridges, roads, like airports. Go to Dubai and look at their airport compared to ours. So I can just go down the list. I mean, we are a degrading society and do I love it here? I'm not leaving. I love it. I'm not asking to go any other place. I want to fix it. But in the meantime, I'm going to make sure self-preservation, my family, I need to de-myth myself, un-brainwash Grant and it started when my dad died. When my dad died, my mom sold the house. Okay, I learned. Kids are 10 and 11. You don't have to be 41 years old to learn. Your kids know stuff that adults can't see anymore. And when I was 10, 11 and 12 years old, I was like, okay, my mom's got money in the bank. She's worried about it every day. She has no income coming in. She's having to sell the house. She's moving us across the street from the high school, the prison. Go back and look at the school that you went to. It looks like a prison. And she wants to make sure we get to school every day. My mom is the one that convinced me to go to college. I spent five years there. Nobody has ever asked me for my college degree, ever. No bank has ever asked, what's your college degree? When did I, I mean, when COVID came around, I'm like, the whole country's going to go for it. They're going to put on a mask. I ran out, got my toilet paper. That's as far as I went. I didn't do the mask the whole time. We never shut down. We continue to have events. I didn't get vaccinated. Can I say the B word? I didn't do any of that stuff. But I'm not a go-along guy. I didn't work in institutions or corporations. I've worked for myself since I was 30 years old. People need to become more self-reliant. You need to challenge what your parents believed because your parents were brainwashed. All our parents were brainwashed. The whole country's been brainwashed. Every country does this. What are your thoughts about the business community? There are a lot of very successful people who made a lot of money using some of the greatness of America, right? Like you can make a lot of money here if you work hard, have a little bit of luck, and you just keep at it in the way that you talk about. They make the money, they get their jets, their boats, and they're gone. Meanwhile, there's the woke industrial complex. You have started speaking out against these big businesses, these big woke businesses, the ESG stuff that is now infecting many of the corporations and the companies, and especially the small businesses are suffering from ESG and woke stuff. You have started speaking out. Why? And what are your thoughts on other business leaders who are kind of like sailing into the sunset and kind of like not dealing with it? They don't want the heat. They got their money, they got their yacht. Look, I get it, but they have their stuff and they don't want to lose their stuff. I have always been a big mouth. When I was in high school, I was a big mouth. I got punched in the mouth because I was a big mouth. I've always had an opinion. The drugs stopped that because I no longer had the self-confidence and enough self-esteem to continue to have my own opinion. But once I got over that, I'm like, and started becoming successful again, I was like, okay, I can have an opinion. Now I need to back my opinion up with some success. You can't just have a big mouth and be broke. For instance, when Google, the big banks, Facebook, it was September 23rd, 2021, there was a deadline. You have to get your vaccine now or you can't work here anymore. We started marketing to that audience immediately. United, Delta, all the airlines were doing the same thing. And I basically ran an ad and it said, hey, if you work for any of the big tech companies, the big banks or the airlines, and you don't wanna get the jab, we have a job to offer you. We'll never ever get involved in your vaccine. Never require you to. If you wanna get it, good, but we'll hire you. We had 1800 resumes in 48 hours. So I've always said, hey, let me use this against the institutions. I'm not an institution. I'm a little guy. So I wrote about this in a book called The big giants, whoever you're competing against, has deficits. So I'm looking for their liabilities. It really wasn't a COVID vaccine issue. It was like, how can I take advantage of this situation? How can I prosper because of their ESG agenda? Which by the way, is losing a lot of steam right now. Since then, all those guys, they're having trouble getting their people back to the office. We never went remote. We refuse to go remote. Okay, so we're like, no, you're gonna work here. You're gonna work at the company. You're gonna show up here. People actually couldn't wait to get back to work. So what do I say to those guys? Hey man, keep doing what you're doing. Most people do not want this stuff. People wanna close the borders. People want good jobs. They're worried about the US dollar. I had a banker was in my office, a local banker was in my office the other day. He's like, before the meeting was over, he's like, I gotta ask you something. Why do you do all this controversial stuff? I said, because there's a net payoff. He's like, what do you mean? I said, we end up with a net gain because of my opinion. We lose people that don't like the stance I took. And I gain a plus audience because they do like it. And the people that don't like my opinion are not gonna do business with me anyway. The moment they find out who I really am, they're gonna be like, I don't wanna do that. And I don't wanna live my life in a supposedly free country without having a free voice. So I'm willing to pay the price of it. Well, we're definitely seeing an alternative economy of non-woke companies that are starting with the Daily Wire and media. A lot of media companies are starting, but not only that, right? Jonathan Isaac, the basketball player that would kneel for the national anthem is starting now an athletic wear company. And so I actually think it's exciting. People who recognize that when you run against the herd, you actually produce something new and you shine, you can shine, really. Yeah, and I think it's gonna become more and more popular to have a voice. It's courage. You said it before the interview. People always say it takes money to make money. That's not true. It takes courage to make money. Takes courage to make a difference. Takes courage to start a company. It takes courage. And we're short on courage in this country. There is definitely a courage deficit. We have a video called Do What You Fear. And it's amazing because I know in your older book, you talk about that. Don't call it, it's never an older book. It's not older book. It's actually, I really love it because it does talk about this need for actually doing what you're afraid to do, right? Like you're afraid of sales and you're now the master of sales. I was afraid of giving speeches or what. And now I both write and give speeches. It's so true that if you just lean into it real hard and you just kind of come through it, you walk out of that fire, you walk out, you never walk out of that fire empty-handed. Tell me a little bit about your experience with why people should do what they fear. Well, it's not going away. 65 years, fear's never gone away in my life, even today. I walked in here, I'm comfortable, a little anxious. I might act like it's not there, but it's there. It's always there. So I just get comfortable with it being there. I'm like, why are you guys trying to get rid of it? I know people medicating to get rid of their fear. It's not going away. As soon as the medication wears off, I promise you, your buddy fear is going to be back. You need to make it a friend. And so now, I do what I'm scared of. Most of the time, I'm able to move into what I'm scared to do. And so I used to play really small. Probably the biggest mistake I've made in my whole life was everything was small thinking with me. When I started my real estate career, I bought small stuff. Safe? Safe. I could calculate around it. I can do that. Baby steps. You got to start somewhere. Start small first. All this stuff that we're told to do is not what the super successful do. They take giant steps. They take big risk. And the middle class, if you notice the middle class, very conservative group of people, they save their money. They protect. They're doing this the whole time. I'm scared. I'm trying to protect myself from something. But if you want to really expand and grow, you have to take risks. And fear is a great indicator of the thing you should do. I just read Elon Musk's new biography. And I mean, he's addicted to doing things. He's a beast. They got us a beast. So it's inspiring and almost overwhelming at the same time. And I totally get that. But you can be controlled through fear. And that's a big problem. When the shutdown happened, they were coming to our office every day. They sent a policeman there and said, tell Mr. Cardone he's not supposed to be at work. Security guy would come to me. Hey, Mr. Cardone, they told me, you're not supposed to be at work. I said, good. Tell him that you told me. I know that I'm not supposed to be at work. They did their job. Then they'd come back four or five hours later. Hey, is he still here? We told you. I'm like, tell him you told me. They just kept coming back until they quit coming back. I was hoping they would arrest me. So I'd get some press for my business. Get some good Instagram. Exactly. I mean, okay, Grant Cardone went to jail. Oh my gosh. Okay. Tell me about your new book. You have also a generous offer that people can. So tell me a little bit about it. What do you hope people would get out of this? Well, it's a wealth creation formula. It's how people need to rethink much of what we talked about today. The banks, housing, savings, piggy banks, credit cards. We have the highest credit card debt we have ever had in this country at the highest rates and people are still using it. The Fed is lying to you guys. Our jobs are great. The jobs are not great. The jobs are going to go away. We're going to have a massive recession and you have to start planning how to create wealth. Become dissatisfied with the middle class. If you're in the middle, become dissatisfied before they push you into poverty because they're gonna, there is an agenda to redistribute wealth again at massive levels. And this book is going to show people the exact formula that I've used for 35 years now over and over and over to get myself out of one bad situation into a better situation and keep improving that without using banks, without using institutions, without having a bunch of connections like most of us don't have, without having a bunch of Harvard friends. I don't have them. Doing it my way in a free country and create wealth for you and your family. And that's what that book's about. Awesome. And people can buy it or there is a free downloadable PDF on our site. You can go to Amazon, but I gave you guys a link so people can just download it to their phone. So free PDF. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you for your generosity. Yeah. This was fascinating. I'm really, I really enjoyed getting to know you better. And I want to have dinner with you and your husband. Let's do it. Thanks. Thank you.