Grant Cardone details his $2 billion apartment debt strategy, leveraging a 27-year depreciation schedule to write off $10 million in annual interest while paying zero federal taxes for two decades. He critiques 401(k)s as scams and predicts states like California and New York will face economic decline due to migration, contrasting this with booming cities. Cardone challenges Mark Cuban's integrity regarding DEI and election predictions, arguing Kamala Harris's policies would inflate housing costs rather than solve shortages. Ultimately, the discussion highlights a deep divide on wealth education, tax structures, and the impending political shifts in the US election. [Automatically generated summary]
The interest on that will be, what, $10 million a year?
I write it all off. If I had $10 billion, it'd be $100 million.
I write it off, and I get to depreciate it in the first year, not 27 years like your house.
So there's all these wealth hacks, these things that Mark Cuban knows, or Warren Buffett knows, that we should be teaching all Americans at a very young age of how to invest their money, how to use money, how to put it to work.
Like, how do you get to be a bank rather than leave your money at a bank?
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♪ It's a crazy world, crazy world ♪ Somebody's gotta have the same views
Big fan, by the way, of what you're doing and getting the word out and having people have other...
Viewpoints and being courageous in the marketplace.
I was just telling you, I left Dubai in the UAE and you think, because of what we're told by CNN and even Fox, you know, that they have no freedoms over there.
They have so many freedoms there that we don't have here, that we're losing, that I was just really excited to be here and see if we could revive the nation.
The only time I get interested in politics is when it starts hurting me personally and my finances.
And that's why I have become very political in the last couple years, you know, 18 months, two years, three years, four years, three and a half years exactly.
You're probably not the only one like that in your world, right?
I would imagine you now see all these tech guys and VC guys that were very apolitical, leaned a little left, and they're all kind of breaking towards Trump.
Yeah. Because it's starting to affect my finances, right?
We were in New York City, we were actually looking at buying a half a billion dollars worth of real estate in New York City in February when they put the judgment on Trump.
And we were flying back from, I think I was in Colorado, flying back to Miami, and my wife's like, you need to start a GoFundMe account for Donald Trump, and I'm like, No, no.
I need to pull out of all these New York deals.
You start the GoFundMe account.
She did. And we pulled out of those deals about a half a billion dollars, have since placed it in Fort Lauderdale in Miami, just because of that judgment.
Now you can see today what they're doing with the mayor.
Yeah. And I told my wife, I said, they're not going to stop here.
It will continue. Well, in 13 years, man, California has just degraded.
Now this thing has started.
You know, they say it all starts in California.
Went to Illinois, went to New York City, New Jersey, all that's happening.
And I think that while Florida may be doing some things right, the reality is these cities are just making terrible decisions, affecting family values, property values, businesses, and be able to invest in my business, and it's pushing people down here.
It's like, come on, man. You know, I think they're going to start caring when they see their revenues.
You know, like just the one decision I made cost that state.
$10 million a year in property taxes.
If you look at the 25,000 people that have left the state, that's probably costing them $3 to $5 billion a year in income tax revenue.
So if people keep voting with their feet, there'll be a moment where New York City and California and all that comes back because somebody will get in there and be a new sheriff.
What do you make of the fact that in New York City, in Los Angeles right now, despite the amount of people that are leaving, that homes still, homes, condos, etc., still are crazily expensive?
Well, you know, first of all, her saying she's going to give $25,000 has only delayed everybody actually making a decision.
Mortgage applications, even though we had a little spike in the last week, is still lower today than it was in 2008 during the greatest housing bust in the history of this country.
Mm-hmm. So, when she said, hey, we're going to give $25,000 away, anybody who was thinking about buying a house said, okay, I'll wait until you do the thing.
She should have done it.
She's literally going to cause housing to become a disaster in this country.
Because if Jared was interested in buying, he's going to be like, I'm going to wait until the first-time buyer's credit.
I can get it later, so I'll wait until February or March of next year.
Dude, the builder is not going to charge $25,000 more.
Dave, the builder's gonna be like, okay, I can charge 75 grand more, okay, because the 25 will be applied to the purchase.
I can get more. The guys, you know, so it's gonna immediately inflate the cost of housing across the country.
Her idea that she's gonna build 3 million homes When there's 4.2 million homes short, well, I'm like, somebody should be asking them, well, who gets them?
Who gets the home? Who's going to build the homes?
If we were trying to really steel man the argument of the people that are running these cities, turning the Roosevelt Hotel into a migrant center, getting rid of...
So I lived... The last house that I had in LA was right off Ventura in the Valley.
And one of the reasons that I left, I moved during the riots because the...
My first house there was too close.
The riots were going by my house. I was like, all right, I'll move up the hill.
It's going to cost more, but I'm going to move up the hill.
But then during COVID, I realized, boy, all these office buildings are empty.
And I was like, I know whether it's tomorrow or two years or four years from now, they will be putting illegals in these things.
And the illegals, when they need to steal something, are just going to walk up the hill.
And that was one of my main calculations in leaving.
So what do you think they're actually thinking when they're instituting all of this nonsense?
You're not going to get Americans to turn on Americans.
But if you got enough 15 or 20 million people that came from Venezuela, pick a country or a combination of countries.
They don't care about killing.
They're not killing their own.
So all you got to do is give them a weapon, make a new army, make a new military.
We have 700 million guns in this country, okay?
We have more guns in this country than exist on the planet.
So, in America, how do you destabilize or, you know, neutralize 700 million guns?
You put them on prescription medication, which we're the most prescribed civilization on planet Earth.
You make them obese.
We have terrible food supplies.
So, the guy can't get out of his bed because he's 400 pounds.
And if he did get out of his bed, he can't unlock his safe because he's freaking drugged up by big pharma.
Or the third thing is, now he's got to fight this No offense to the Venezuelans, I'm sure you're good people, but whatever group of people that came in here that now have a new job because they don't have a job.
They came here with no job, no place to live, no food, no water.
What do you think they're going to do?
And I also believe the old cats and dogs thing.
Dude, I know people from different parts of the world where they're like, Grant, we have a ritual that In Haiti, it's a thing.
It's a thing, dude. I've lived in New Orleans, Louisiana.
There's voodoo down there, bro.
They kill animals as a sacrifice.
Some of them take a bit of the blood out of the animal and digest it in order to consume the spirits of the animal.
So anybody that thinks 30 million cats and dogs are eaten every year on this planet.
So anybody that says that's not happening somewhere, that's bullshit.
It's always happened. And when you invite 20 million people here that don't have food, don't have water, don't have a place to live, don't have a job, I can't hire them.
What does anybody think is going to happen?
So why are they doing it? It can only be for voters and possibly voters.
A militia. So how do the same- Because I would think twice about killing you.
Thank you. Because you look like me.
You look like me. I'm like, he's a white person.
Like, okay, he's a successful guy.
Like, it would take a lot for me to want to kill- Same, same.
Somebody in my neighborhood. Thank you.
So the more I'm not associated with you, right?
If you drop me off in another part of the world, me, I'm a civilized person.
Like, I don't want to kill anybody.
But if you drop me off in another part of the world- And said, hey man, these look like strangers to me.
They look like the enemy, right?
Because they are. Because I'm trying to get their food, their water, and even their cats and dogs.
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It's interesting. And I've never ate cats or dogs that I know of.
So you say. Yeah. It's interesting you bring that up because I've mentioned on the show a couple times in the last week that there's one Harris Wall sign in my neighborhood that I walk by with my dog.
And I try to be very friendly with my neighbors because I think it's important.
Not only it's nice to know people, but if the shit ever hit the fan...
Your neighbor is less inclined to break into your house if he knows your kids.
So I think it's in your own self-interest to just know people around and take care of your house and all that.
But I keep thinking, if I bump into this neighbor, if I'm just walking by the house with the sign and they walk out, it's like, yeah, I'll say hi.
But I would think that they're completely insane.
And it's that sort of, that's not based on skin color or anything else, but it's based on how our ideologies have so gone in different ways that you could live here in the freest place in the country, in the world probably, and still be trying to bring in that.
Right. So we're going to show some of the B-roll of the tweet exchanges that you guys have been having because you're in it with Mark Cuban right now.
That's what I was referencing up top.
And everyone, I've fought with him on Twitter.
Elon fights with him all the time.
Something about him is extremely confusing to people because he sort of seems to make sense as a capitalist and what you see maybe on Shark Tank or what he was doing on Shark Tank.
No, no. We play that clip all the time from the WEF. I mean, it's legit.
So basically, in essence, they would want to keep virtually everybody that does not own a home now out of home ownership because that really is the key to unlocking the rest of your wealth, in essence.
That's the worst. Yeah. And so, somebody needs to sit down with her and say, look, when rates breach 4%, you will have so much home activity in this country.
Number one, prices will come down more than 25,000.
You will have prices drop.
wants to go to a $6 million house next from his $3 million house, he can't make that move
right now because his rate's going to go from 2.7 to 7.
And so his interest rate on the same money would be, his payment would be triple.
And that's what's happened in this country.
Interest rates tripled.
Rents are going to continue to explode if somebody doesn't handle this.
Unaffordable housing is over.
There's no such thing as it.
It will never happen again in our lifetime.
You will never see affordable housing.
And the government just needs to tell people the truth.
The solution is...
To take all the 4 million houses that were short...
We don't actually have a housing shortage.
We have a desirable housing shortage.
Right. That's why they're tearing down all these $3 million houses around here.
Yeah. Because they want a new house.
There are 45 million apartments in America with about a 10% vacancy.
That would be... If I was the president, okay, or if I was the head of the housing authority, I would give an incentive to apartment owners and say, rent that unit, rent your vacancy, Make a deal.
It'll be tax revenue zero to you.
And we could give 4.2 million people housing before the end of the month and solve the problem without the tax revenues being affected or your taxes being affected.
So I want to bring up another one from a clip we played on the show this morning.
Kamala has been big on the idea that the grocery store is our price gouge.
Yeah. And she'd like to put some controls in.
I keep trying to use a very simple analogy with people that it has nothing to do with the evil corporations deciding suddenly because Democrats are in power they want to raise prices, but this is just what runs through the economy from the chicken feed all the way to the gas to get the eggs to the store.
Again, well, I guess I know your answer, but it's like, what do you think they're thinking?
How much of this do you just blame on the education system that really no one knows this?
I get emails all the time because we don't do a ton on this type of granular economic stuff.
But I get tons of emails from people being like, I did not learn anything about credit cards or interest rates or anything in high school or even in college.
And then they get out into the real world and they have no freaking clue what to do.
Yeah. Well, the way me and Cuban started talking is I sent a letter to Kamala and to Trump and said, look, America needs a wealth education, not financial literacy.
They need wealth education because every person in America should be rich.
If you'd have bought apartments in Sherman Oaks, You wouldn't have just made that one score on that house.
You'd have been paid. You'd have had total tax write-offs.
No exclusion on the tax write-offs.
Like, on interest on a home loan, you can write off up to the first $750 of debt.
So, at 7%, you can write off maybe $50,000 a year.
I have $2 billion worth of debt on my apartments.
The interest on that will be, what, $10 million a year?
I write it all off. If I had $10 billion, it'd be $100 million.
I write it off, and I get to depreciate it in the first year, not 27 years like your house.
So there's all these wealth hacks, these things that Mark Cuban knows, or Warren Buffett knows, that we should be teaching all Americans at a very young age of how to invest their money, how to use money, how to put it to work.
How do you get to be a bank rather than Leave your money at a bank.
Talk about this unrealized gains tax that they're trying to push through.
Because this is to me like, we've talked about some bananas stuff that they're doing and rates and things like that.
But to me, this is like, if you truly wanted to keep people in servitude, you wanted to destroy human ingenuity, the ability to invest, the ability to do any of the things that you've laid out here.
I mean, even Cuban says that it would crash the stock market.
It would stop all activity.
This is the first thing that would happen, okay?
If you told me tomorrow, hey, Grant, we're gonna start...
I mean, look, all of this can be hacked and worked around, right?
Like the $50,000 business credit.
I'll get a bunch of those.
I could probably get 50 of those in the first year.
I'll set up 50 different businesses, make them all profitable, and get $2.5 million from the IRS. The money won't even go to the right people, dude.
On the unrealized gains, all I'm going to do is set up a bunch of separate independent companies, break up my corporations, just like we did during COVID. When they started saying, hey, you're going to have a $14,000 fine if you have more than 100 people, good, I'll only have 99 people.
There's always a workaround with the government, so it's just bullshit.
They'd never pass it.
It would shock Wall Street.
Wall Street would be shocked.
Activity will stop. Nobody will trade their assets anymore.
If capital gains go up, people will quit selling their products and services or quit trading their assets.
So fewer assets are traded, they become more expensive.
The Democrats, every time they get involved, all they do is inflate the prices of the assets When they're trying to protect people, they actually prevent people from...
So a certain set of people, not most of my audience know, but a certain set of people hear, wait a minute, wait a minute, this guy's worth all this hundreds of millions of dollars and he's basically paid zero federal income tax 18 out of 20 years.
So when they say the rich aren't paying their fair share, it actually does make sense.
I'm not sending this money. Your family's not getting this money.
Your family's not getting this money.
I am not depriving your family of something.
Ask the people here locally how they feel about the taxes I pay here in Florida.
Okay? You know, whatever I paid in property taxes is more than most people will ever pay in their lifetime, earn in their lifetime.
So I want my money to stay in my local environment.
That's my argument. If I was running for president, I'd run on that.
We're going to teach every person in this country, even if we have taxes, I'm going to teach you How to pay zero taxes, legally, without going to jail, and how you'll have more money for your local community so the locals can take care of their community.
So I take my money, I take garbage fiat, I convert it to something real, like this, but this one's steroids.
Because I don't really want to pay for this.
Your guy's back there working right now, you gotta pay him.
I don't want to pay for him. I don't pay any of these guys.
Yeah, probably not, right?
These guys are out of love for you, right?
But what I want to do is I want to own property that pays me income and that income from the property pays the property taxes, pays the expenses, the maintenance, the people, the problems, the taxes, whatever.
It pays for everything, including the debt.
And so when I buy that big piece of property, the tax code If I buy, we just bought half a billion dollars worth of stuff here.
Those properties are going to come probably this year with somewhere between $200 and $250 million worth of tax breaks.
Depreciation. It's legitimate, too, because those properties do depreciate.
So it's not that I'm not paying taxes.
I'm not paying them today.
They're going to be deferred into the future, but I never sell my assets, so I'm never actually going to pay taxes.
It's really, it's unbelievable when I see some of the OGs that are here, even in the neighborhood that I'm in, people that bought their houses for like a hundred grand, something like that, that now are walking with all this cash and then who knows what I don't know what they do with it, but it's amazing.
But what does that say about the state of these cities?
That Michael Jordan's house, massive estate, it had memorabilia, basketball court, the whole thing.
50 million bucks in the scheme of things is nothing for a super fan of Michael Jordan to just be like, I'll steal that thing, and he could not get rid of it.
At that time, it was the right place, but he didn't look to the future, right?
So with real estate, you can't just look today.
You gotta be like, okay, but where's the migration going?
And there's got to be barriers.
California's got big barriers, New York City.
But as long as the people start sucking out, when they migrate out, like Arizona's been a freaking unbelievable.
People have made so much money in Arizona because California went over there, out of their $3 million house, saw a $400,000 house and said, I'll buy two of these.
And so that's going to continue to happen around the country.
Do you think that is largely because of Trump's business experience and that he had to fight the system to do all these things in New York City, even to build the ice skating rink in Central Park?
And he had to fight the machine constantly.
So then that's sort of what he's done now politically.
He's a street guy. I also love how they constantly try to put Trump down for getting some money from his dad, which to me, it's like, I hope I'm going to give some money to my kids that they will then do something great with.
Right. When I'm ready. So I control the asset, but I'm not paying them money.
First of all, it's a tax deduction.
Yeah. Okay.
The income they get is tax-free for the first four or five years.
So when they need a toy, which I can't write off, these are the wealth hacks, right?
I can't write off toys.
They can buy their own toy.
They don't pay taxes.
Right. So, and, you know, then they get to make decisions about money and how to earn it and what to do with it and You know, they'll definitely be required to sign prenups or I won't go to the wedding.
Yeah. There's always somebody finding the numbers.
But even, you know, putting aside shenanigans, I am worried that there's just, even look at some of the things you explained here, like basic stuff that most people should know, that this is what you do for a living.
You're always telling people stuff that they should know.
I'm worried that there is just a certain amount of people in this country that simply do not understand what the issues are.
They don't understand any basics, whether it's economics or foreign policy or border policy.
They're so confused about everything, they're just like, oh, she smiles and Democrats seem nice.
Yeah. So it doesn't matter how many people we show what reality is.