Real Deal Chat Podcast

Transcript

Jack Hoss:

Patrick Grimes joins me again. You can find him by heading over to passiveinvestingmastery.com. That’s going to be a clickable link in the show notes. But better yet, if you go “/book,” you’re going to get a free book. And if you pick the physical version, I think Patrick, you even sign them. Right? Before they get sent out. So take advantage of that. That’s a great offer. So last time you were on, we dug into recession proof investing. Since then, what’s new in your world, either in business or life that’s got you excited right now?

Patrick Grimes:

Well, what I’m excited about is being on a holiday trip with the family. And we had a late Thanksgiving in California in an RV. Just got done with a couple days in Disneyland and then doing an early Christmas in Northern California with the other half the family up there. And then we’ll be back to Honolulu. So that’s what’s late. And so that’s why I’m tuning in here from the RV park next to Disneyland.

Jack Hoss:

Well, two things. I think it’s for some reason, it just doesn’t… A lot of people would go to Honolulu or Hawaii for their vacation and you kind of escaped there for yours.

Patrick Grimes:

Well, we’ve been around the world, my wife and I together and independently. At the same time, when you’re in Honolulu, sometimes you just want to hunker down with family for a while. So we have just a hoard of family and friends we’re entertaining as we make our journey from San Diego to Sacramento.

Jack Hoss:

Another thing that’s really striking is that you’re going to be doing this for the entire month. A lot of people don’t have that level of flexibility, but with your passive investing, you obviously do.

Patrick Grimes:

Time freedom, location freedom. It doesn’t mean we’re not busy, but it means we have a little more choices as to what and when we do with our time.

Jack Hoss:

So you’re based in Honolulu now. How has living in Hawaii influenced the way you build passive investments?

Patrick Grimes:

Well, like many of your listeners, I was a hardworking professional in corporate America, did automation and robotics, mostly out of California and flew around in some various states where I met my wife who does feature linked animated films. And so we were both… I was a bit of a road warrior and she was hunkered down at Dreamworks and Disney and Nickelodeon. We never thought, “Hey, we’ll be…” When we first met, “We’ll be able to go live somewhere else and be remote.” That wasn’t really part of our calculus at the time. As COVID hit, we realized, “Hey, we can do everything remotely.”

And I was a contractor and she became offsite. So she came out one day and said, “Let’s move to Honolulu.” And two and a half weeks later, I had us on a plane. So we spent a lot of time going back and forth and just realized that we both prioritized all the things that matter in our lives. We went to dinner and me being the engineer, I scored them and waited them. And we had two completely different, for very different reasons, Hawaii won by a landslide for both of us. And I’ll tell you, mine was that I got my time back with my family.

I was working till 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 PM. When my boy, my two, my now three-year-old, just turned three a couple days ago, he was going to bed at 7:30. I’d miss him almost every night. I’d take him in the morning and maybe a little bit during the day. But then when we would spend half our time in Hawaii, it was incredible. I could, every single night, around 4:00 or 5:00 PM, I am able to spend the rest of the night because it’s 7:00 or 8:00 PM Pacific or 10:00, 11:00 PM Eastern. Nobody’s calling me. There’s no meetings getting set up. And so it just became a real exciting development for us. And that’s my highest weighted factor.

Jack Hoss:

Well, you mentioned you have the engineering and robotics automation background. Now you’re the Passive Investing Mastery guy. When you meet somebody at these family barbecues you’re currently at, how do you explain what you do without their eyes glazing over?

Patrick Grimes:

I have told people that I used to do engineering and now I’m not exactly sure what it is that I do. Because putting together investments isn’t something that I think people grad… They’re thinking architect or engineer. Right? Or doctor, lawyer. So I tell them I’m a full-time investor.

But that’s so obtuse, right? It takes a long time to be able to describe such a thing. So it’s a little tough. I haven’t quite figured out the trick. I do say I’m an entrepreneur because I have built numerous businesses now and those have been a lot of success along the way. Had a fair share of challenges, but the entrepreneurial side of me has really come out.

Jack Hoss:

So can you walk back to that time when you transitioned from your engineering career to this? What was the moment you realized, “Okay, my future is not in a W2, it’s in building a diversified passive portfolio.”

Patrick Grimes:

Well, I am still a geek in my heart and I still wonder if I’ll go back to engineering, Jack, at one point, but the moment… So let me walk into it. Right? Because there was a few moments. There was the time that I was slaving away as an engineer during the day and doing real estate, single family homes by night. I realized that I just, man, I lost my life trading time away from my family, friends, and hobbies, and I ended up having to stop doing that when I met my wife. And so that’s when I realized I can’t do both and I had to make some choices.

So I walked into our marriage and said I’m going to do things differently when we got married and after. At that point, I decided to become a contractor in engineering, which freed up more time. Allowed me to reprioritize and be able to do things that I wouldn’t have otherwise be able to do. And I also became offsite at that point. It was a big leap. Right at the time that I get married, I decreased my day job. And then fast-forward, my wife gets pregnant. And then right around the time that the baby’s going to be born, I remember that.

I remember that December he was born. I had to make the choice to continue and double down in engineering or take an out, an opportunity I had to walk away from it. And right when I was craving in my soul for more stability, I decided to go for entrepreneurship. And I’m glad I did. I remember the very day when my engineering email shut off and all I had left was my real estate email. And I went from being crazy busy, but split between multiple worlds to busy, hyper focused on one exciting world.

And that was a very enlightening day for us, a very fulfilling day for me. And it was a little scary because now I had this other life I’m responsible for and not relying on a paycheck unless I pay myself. And so, but I realized I’ll never be younger. I’ll never be willing to take on risks like I am today. I’ll never have more time to recover than I do today. And it was in that deep discussions with some trusted colleagues of mine that I just decided to go for it. And I’m glad I did.

Jack Hoss:

Yeah. And that’s interesting you say that. You were looking for stability and you jumped into entrepreneurship. There had to have been, you mentioned being, that it was a little frightening, but I don’t think that really emphasizes how scary that time probably was.

Patrick Grimes:

Well, it was really the two steps. Here I’m getting married and I’m walking into a contractor thing, moving away from stability and I’m Asian parents on that side. And we got married in Big Bear and then China. And now I have a kid. I told my wife, “Let’s not even tell your parents for a while,” because they are doctors and have worked in the same hospital for 40 years. He’s a chief surgeon of the ICU and so it’s much more conservative.

And yeah, it was a scary time, but also it was fulfilling trying to juggle multiple priorities, finally being able to make decisions and have a runway, which I had built up over time. I had some finances built up that I was able to… I was like, “Here’s my runway. Got to make it happen in this timeframe.” And the good news is we became profitable before the cash reserves ran out. Right? And here we are, my wife still hasn’t had to gone back to work and we made our bounce back and forth between Southern, Orange County and Southern California and Hawaii, permanent in Hawaii. So a lot of good stuff.

Jack Hoss:

It’s really kind of interesting, especially the concept now that you were being pulled into two different worlds. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like when you were able to have that level of focus on your core business and what it actually did when it came to scaling and finding success? Do you think that you could have done where you are today if you didn’t have that focus?

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah. Actually, Passive Investing Mastery did come out of, was essentially the birth child of that focus. Whereas before I was doing a bunch of investments, partnering with others and I wasn’t always the lead. I was usually a minority position and I was trying to carve out as much time as I could, flying around doing unit walks, underwriting deals, raising some capital. But I wasn’t able to take on and be a primary sponsor while I was having a very demanding high-tech job, which I also, I liked.

And so we actually decided that, you know what? Doing only real estate and I didn’t actually think that was the end game. I thought that is an allocation and that’s why I got into it. I got into it to diversify out of high-tech. So why am I of a company that all I’m doing is real estate? And if I was to rethink my path forward and to reflect to the world what I truly believe to be the right investment allocation strategies, what would that company look like? And it was in that time that birthed this concept of Passive Investing Mastery, which is a more collective, more focus on non-correlated alternatives, more broad focus where we educate.

I was able to create a lot of… We’ve done over 50 webinars now with different alternative investing strategies in our alternative investing mastery series. I would’ve never had time to do that. And when I was an engineer, I wish somebody came along and said, “Hey, here’s the 50 different alternatives you can invest in,” not just “Here’s the 50 stocks and Bitcoin and startups.” Okay? Just… And so now I have the opportunity to do that. At the same time, I’m educating.

I’ve been on podcasts and stages and educational webinars talking about resilient allocations, not just in real estate or in the stock market, oil and gas or in gold, which those are all great and I’m in those, all, but also in things that up and to the right that are non-correlated and resilient so that you can build real sustaining wealth like healthcare and legal. And we have a litigation fund in addition to debt, private credit, in addition to commercial acquisitions.

And right now we’re in the process of still, we’re presenting in the first quarter to our investors our healthcare fund we’ve been working on for quite some time. And so that, just like the legal industry and education and some others, still needed in downturns. And it was all of that freedom and that focus and that ability to take a step back and then look for not time out of scarcity, but time out of purpose, time out of direction, time where I have the opportunity to aim and that birthed this company.

Jack Hoss:

You just mentioned that you’re now launching a healthcare fund. Could you talk a little bit about how you determine what niche you’re going to tackle next? I mean, you probably review a number of options before you make that final decision that, “Let’s give this one a try.”

Patrick Grimes:

Mm-hmm. I have a whole platform where we sift through hundreds of uncorrelated alternatives and we deep dive into them in live sessions with a lot of investors chiming in and we two to three panelists have been doing it for decades. And we’ve kissed a lot of frogs along the way. And I’ve traveled around the United States and the world looking at different kinds of assets, different kinds of investment strategies and walked away from… I’ve been in enough partnerships and enough deals at this point when I realized I should have been in a lot less partnerships and a lot less deals.

So I agree with all that. To simplify things, I really think there’s… I’m used to say non-correlation to the rest of your portfolio. Right? And recession resilience. What non-correlation means is that you can’t just be all in stocks or all in real estate. If you’re in a lot of different kinds of real estate, you’re still driven by the same market fundamentals. All stocks are driven by the same market fundamentals. Right? Oil and gas, commodities, market fundamentals. But the healthcare industry, well, people need, they need care.

They need care whether it’s good times or bad times. It’s not driven by the same fundamentals. In the legal industry, legal attorneys are really busy and in good times. And when people get litigious in bad times, attorneys are really busy. You look at the data that we show on our decks and those are just up and to the right. They don’t seem to care what’s going on with gold, oil and gas, interest rates. Other things like education, people need skilling and upskilling, CPA firms, plumbers. Right? Those are all kinds of industries which you would consider are sort of resilient and non-correlated to each other.

US dollar and gold, they’re not correlated. Right? They don’t rise and fall together. They have inverse correlation. Right? Sometimes they go the opposite direction. So I tend to say non-correlation. Right? To the rest of your portfolio. And that can be different for anybody. If you’re a real estate guy and all you’re in, in real estate, I’ve lost it all one time back in two thousand nine and 10 being all in real estate. I may be independence, but it’s not stability. It’s not security because you don’t have enough pillars. And so I say non-correlation, I say resilience, recession resilience.

What I like to think is like the sentiment driven paper that most of America has their wealth in and the stock market, not a big fan of that. So I tend to like that overlapping Venn diagram. More recently, I’ve call it in the last year or two, I’ve been really taking a hard look at AI disruption. So installation from AI disruption is most certainly that third Venn diagram. And inside there is our focus in broad sense and trying to help be a part of the solution to educate and also offer these kinds of alternative investment strategies to help round out investors’ portfolio is what we’re trying to do.

Jack Hoss:

I was going to ask you regarding your future investing in AI and technology, because I would imagine you are attracted to that because of your background. But before we dive into that, I want to remind everybody that they can definitely learn more by heading over to passiveinvestingmastery. and slash book to take advantage of that offer.

And then if you found this conversation helpful, share this with one of your investor friends. And if you’re watching us on YouTube, give us a like and subscribe. So Patrick, let’s jump into that. With your technology background, I would imagine that some of these disruptions, AI being one of them that’s on the horizon is attractive. Are you reviewing some of those things now and how are you tackling that?

Patrick Grimes:

I can be a little bit confusing sometimes, Jack, because everything you said would seem reasonable. I would be very attracted to investing in AI. And that may be true in some very specific infrastructure related projects, but I have been through too many bubbles in my own life, whether it’s be housing and I had a whole career doing custom machine design automation and robotic solutions, working with startups all over Silicon Valley. It’s where I got my master’s in engineering and an MBA. And I would travel all over from the height, the big tech firms, Facebook and Google.

I worked on Google’s autonomous car Waymo 10 years ago and Lockheed’s solar satellites, Boeing, defense projects. I worked on catheters that have bladed inside the heart. And I worked on Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci robot 20 years ago. And these are a lot of those startups that turned into really amazing things. The vast number of them tanked, tanked. And I saw so often the labor of love that was the painful custom design and automation world where everything you do as a prototype, I saw so often that the efforts were just mothballed and those startups didn’t pan out.

There were some ones where I had tens of millions of dollars of projects that I learned just like the stock market, I cannot bet against a prediction and I would rather work with something that’s more calculable. I’d rather invest in something where I can look back over time and I can see long-term fundamental stability. I can see things that aren’t prone to bubbles, that healthcare, education, legal, things where I can invest in that may be cyclic, but I can invest in ways that are a little more resilient, like in commercial debt where you have a lot of insulation from market volatility at the top.

So no, I’m not investing in AI startups or AI projects. Similarly now, I’m not investing in office and commercial. It’s amazing buys, but we don’t know how far that hot knife’s going to fall. We don’t know where you’re going to repurpose all this office. They talk about AI right now is a hot knife cutting up, going sky-high right now. I don’t know which, if it will fall collectively, but there will be winners and losers. It’s too dynamic and changing too fast to predict it, just like I don’t predict the stock market.

So not a fan of AI technology investments, potentially some infrastructure projects though. Right? More energy related. Because even aside from AI, we’re in a terrible energy crisis in this country and there’s 20 times the need coming than we have capacity for. I’ve heard some projections and it’s more. So those kinds of projects supersede any particular bubble like AI. Sorry if that was a long answer, but I put a lot of thought in these things.

Jack Hoss:

No, it makes a lot of sense. I’ve been kind of wondering when or if we’re going to see this bubble pop too, because I couldn’t agree with you more. I think that’s exactly what’s going to… something is going to happen. In fact, I find it almost silly that you can subscribe to some of these services at $20 a month. It’s got to be a loss-leader. I don’t know how some of these companies are actually making money at that price, especially with the amount of compute and energy that they consume to keep maintain this infrastructure.

Patrick Grimes:

Absolutely. I mean, there will be some winners. There will be a lot more losers. Whether or not it collapses, I don’t think it will, not like the dot-com bubble, but there’s a lot of really smart people out there that think they can predict the markets. And they’re a lot smarter than me, but they know that the probability of the big right’s pretty low because they’re pretty smart. So I don’t want to pretend to be one of those people.

Jack Hoss:

Well, let’s talk about your diversification again. Can you share a story of a time when being diversified literally saved your bacon?

Patrick Grimes:

Well, it’s interesting you say that. I keep some cash reserves on the sidelines. There’s a lot of, even financial planners will tell you you need nine months, 10 months worth and years worth of expenses. And I don’t know, it’s like four years ago or something, I decided, “Look, I’ve just got cash. What am I doing?” And I wrote an article in Forbes on inflation and I’m like, “I need to look myself in the mirror.”

So I took my cash reserves and I started breaking them up into gold and silver and some into Bitcoin and I started thinking non-correlation, the dollar’s inflating like crazy. But if the dollar inflates and there’s global economic unrest or there’s a recession, then gold’s going to go up. So why don’t I do that? So what happened? Gold and silver has been going up and up and up. Right? When I bought gold, it was high, quote unquote, “High.”

But I didn’t buy for a spot price of gold. I bought for a non-correlated hedge in my portfolio, for example. Right now, commercial real estate just went through a horrible time, 20, 10, 20, 30 percent losses throughout the country. Some places like Atlanta, Austin, 50%. Some of those properties lost 50% of their value from their peak. Really unexpected too. Atlanta was usually a pretty good market, but they just made some really poor choices. Meanwhile, multifamily apartments haven’t been cash flowing on net and they’ve been losing value.

It’s a challenging time, but other markets like the stock market, it’s been up. So diversifying across those two would have helped. Oil and gas is still cash flowing at a time when real estate’s not. Our legal investments, they’re performing just like they were before. Healthcare has still been performing. And the point is, when you take your pie and the more slices that you divvy it up into markets, investments, complete, isolated, non-correlated nature, different market fundamentals, you feel better. You feel better about your portfolio, I do. And I think in all those cases, you’re in a net win. Right? You’re in a net win.

Jack Hoss:

So you work with a lot of investors that are looking for a passive route to investing. Many of the people that are listening here are going to be ones that are more, quite a bit more active, but they’d like to work towards that. What habits or processes have your world could an investor steal and plug into their own business right now?

Patrick Grimes:

Well, let me first say that-

Jack Hoss:

And try to be a little more passive?

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah. And there’s a challenge with active people out there. Right? And that’s, you’re really good at your career, you’re making some money and you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to go do something else.” I’m going to become the expert at that, like I did with single family, but then it took over all my time. And then at the end of the day, all this real estate, but I wasn’t financially secure. I was independent, I was financially independent because I had income from it, but I didn’t have stability. So I was like, “Well, let me go do apartment buildings. Oh, let me do work on some more legal. Let me go work on…”

The challenge out there is that active people, they suffer from the DIY trap where you end up getting in there and you get really good at this one thing. And this one thing then takes over and you become way over allocated in this one thing. Your intention wasn’t to take control over something. Your intention was to get financial security, financial independence. It’s not actually possible, and even Elon Musk himself can’t quite have a quality of life and do enough different things to be able to build security. In order to build true financial security, you have to be invested in a dozen completely different types of non-correlated investments.

These are ones that are different industries altogether. It’s not possible in a lifetime to become the expert in a dozen different things. I think the challenge with those operators, like I’m doing this one thing, I’m putting it all here, is that just like I have many times, you get kind of wrapped up in what we’re doing and we lose sight of what we’re really looking for. And that’s that ability to not worry about our finances. But you’ll never get there, if you have to control it, you have to be active in everything, it’s not possible.

It’s a DIY trap, right? So I don’t know, that wasn’t the answer directly to your question, but it was underlying the need for people to learn to partner and become passive. And that’s actually what I believe to be the real only way to generate necessarily allocations across different markets to have stability. So that’s one piece that they could add to the toolbox, Jack. I’m not sure if I quite answered your question though.

Jack Hoss:

Oh, I appreciate that. Another question I’d have though is regarding scaling your business. As you’ve been doing this and adding additional industries and scaling your team, what have been the real growing pains? Where have they showed up in that process?

Patrick Grimes:

Lots. We went through a process of working on EOS a couple years ago, which really helped, but building a collective vision, building collective objectives and aligning interests in the company, it was a challenge. Getting middle management in place with marketing and underwriting and investor relations and we’re bringing on outsourcing to fund administration, bookkeeping CPA and taxes has been a challenge. I’m trying to think of what would be… I think the way that we were able to scale with agility and quickly was actually through using virtual labor, virtual assistance, people that instead of brick and mortar, working with people all over the world.

And we have people in Latin America and South America, Philippines and India that have been full-time with me for years. I mean, I think one of them is like eight years or something now. And they’re, I mean, they’re lifelong people for me. And they’re out of locations where they specialize in certain aspects, but they help manage large parts of the company. And I think potentially the use of that, of adopting a virtual company early helped to be able to not have people come into an office, not be limited to people that can come into the office, but be able to spearfish the right people with the right skill sets, regardless of where they’re at in the globe.

And to be able to do it at really high salaries relative to where they’re at and align interest with bonuses. We’re about to do Christmas bonuses right now and we shut the company down all of Christmas and New Year’s. And so those whole weeks, two weeks every year. I think that was probably, I mean, there’s a lot there, but it’s hard to… We could do a whole episode on that, Jack. I’m not sure exactly.

Jack Hoss:

Yeah, I’m sure we could. In fact, I’d be curious more regarding you and your mindset at the time. At what point did you realize that you couldn’t do this on your own and you had to start bringing people on?

Patrick Grimes:

Super early. When I graduated grad school, even before then, I read the The 4-Hour Workweek. I’m trying to think, was that 20 years ago, 15 years ago? And I hired the two companies in the first edition of that book, Brickwork India and Ask Sunday, and I had them helping me when I was doing engineering work. And I think there was one group that I looked back and I spent like 15 grand with or 20 grand with, and that is a huge amount of hours for Philippines and India. Huge.

And I still have one P desk that I’m still using, and that’s been 10 years now. And so I mean, we’re talking like way back when I was just doing engineering. I was leveraging help with the VAs out there around different countries and that only, those same, a lot of those same partners came with us and now we’re just doing all the real estate stuff now. The majority of them, we reinvented the company and we started polling ones that we found that had experience.

And it was quite fascinating actually. Because once you become a place people like to work and you’re a good group of people and you take yourself not so seriously, but seriously enough to build a good environment and you do your happy hours and you… I just got a machete sent to me from the Philippines handmade with videos showing it being made by the blacksmith, like my name initialed in it, shipped to my house in Honolulu to open up coconuts as a gift. Eventually you start developing relationships where they start attracting other people and you build a really fun company.

Jack Hoss:

You mentioned that you’re not really interested, at least for the time being, investing in AI, but could you talk a little bit about how you might be using this in your business now and maybe it’s impacted a process and what that looked like before and now after.

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah. So in some apartment buildings, there’s AI that are answering the calls and scheduling time with leasing agents that allow the leasing agents to focus more on just walking instead of being in the office and scheduling. Also, they take the calls for service and support and maintenance and do the automated follow-ups. And if they get a good review, then they prompt them to put a review on Google and Yelp, which directly correlate to income increases. Of course, those are more stabilized property kind of things. It takes a lot of work to really get these value adds.

We’re using AI for a lot of legal work right now. In fact, I used to spend… I mean, I think when I used to put together different investments, I used to take 20, 30 grand before I was done. With AI now and my knowledge, I can get those agreements and those offering documents about 90, 95 percent of the way there. And my securities attorney charges me per hour, I don’t know, maybe 15, 20 percent of what he used to get across the finish line. Same thing with our underwriting and analysis. We use a ton of AI just to aggregate data, take rent rolls, convert them into Excel files and fill out our underwriting templates. I’m using AI.

I do a lot of writing and I really haven’t embraced AI as much as I should for just write things. But I have started coming up with GPTs that do amalgamate all of my written content, all the podcasts, and then help me with what’s the best way based on everything I’m talking about to get the message out there that I’m trying to get out there and help put together some of these mastery sessions, help come up with outlines. My marketing guys are using AI for all kinds of stuff.

They have AI to take our videos and get rid of the ums and errs, to automatically splice and dice them and put them on social, come up with the blurbs. I don’t really deal with that stuff too much. I’m using a lot of AI and spreadsheets, helping coming up with complex calculations and also applying spreadsheets to make sure everything’s correct. And of course, whenever you do something like that, you still got to submit it to your finance guy, your CPA, your attorney to have them review it. But usually they’re just like, “Yeah, looks fine” type stuff. I’m using AI Whisperer on my phone and I’m recently been working on Claude Code. I don’t know if you know Claude Code.

Jack Hoss:

Very well.

Patrick Grimes:

Oh, you do? Okay. So I’ve been working, I was just this morning I was testing out some Claude Code with a friend of mine because it can literally take over your whole computer, take over every single application and you can launch and build its own AIs. You can do a bunch of them in parallel. I think one of my friends is doing 30 in parallel. But the problem I have is you can run all these, you can build this prompt and you can run all this data, but then you still have to get it somewhere.

You still have to do something with it. And so I’ve still not quite mastered at the agent side. That actually takes the efficiency gained and doesn’t require copy and pasting and doesn’t require a bunch of work. Those can go integrate with all your tools, our best portals, CRM, email accounts, PDF, Word files. It’s still not 100% there, Jack. I mean, it’s still, you got to have the terminal up and you got to constantly be like, “Okay, approve access.” And you still got to…

I feel like in the next year, it’s going to come to the point where I don’t have to use the keyboard anymore and I’m already talk… I mean, I went from typing everything to now I’m talking to my computer all day. And it’s kind of a pain because I’m constantly muting. I don’t know if you’ve been like that, but I can’t even sit with my colleague in the same room anymore because we’re both just talking to our computers all day.

Jack Hoss:

Yeah. It’s almost Star Trek-like, isn’t it?

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah. And it’s the stream of conscious, “This is what I want to do. Can you help me work through this and this is what I’m grappling with? Or here’s the 6,000 data points we got back. Can you help me work through some meaningful steps to do some due diligence on this?” And we got 6,000 files sent to us and we’re just trying to sift through for our due diligence on something we’re working on. So I mean, there’s a lot there. I mean, it’s just overwhelming. And I’ve got to-

Jack Hoss:

Yeah. I’d be curious to see what Tim Ferriss would… How he would change the book now with AI in the picture.

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah. I think from where I’ve seen it go just in the last… And I did a whole webinar on our uses of AI a year and a half ago and I told my director, Mark, just take it down because it’s just now I feel like it’s so archaic now. I wouldn’t tell people to go do these things anymore. But it’s still really cool stuff. But I mean, what I’m doing now is just totally freaking mind-blowing.

And what I’m going to be doing in a year from now, it’s kind of scary. And that’s why it’s so critical right now, to make sure that you have some insulation from AI disruption in your portfolio. And that’s why we have that third Venn diagram. There’s very few people that… I think Elon was talking about there’s very few people that see the silos of the technology awareness.

There’s very few people on the planet, and I’m not one of them, but I’ve gone up the elevator a bit and I can see the technology capability out there. It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying, right? How much can be done and how much more efficient I already am and how I’m not paying 500 to 1,000 dollar an hour for the work that I am taking weeks and months in iteration to get done that I used to do. So it’s going to be really interesting to see how it all plays out.

Jack Hoss:

Well, Patrick, this has been a fantastic conversation. I’m just going to remind people that if you’re finding AI and some of this technology a little overwhelming and hard to stay in front of, that’s where we step in. So head over to realdealcrew.com. We can help you navigate some of that. But Patrick, if you’re ready, we’ll jump into the rapid fire and close out this episode, unless you have anything else we should have tried to cover here so far?

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah, I think you already offered the book. I give away a free book. Listens from thought leaders and we sign it and send it out. You download the ebook or get an actual physical copy. My aunt runs an Amazon store, so she stores it for me and makes sure that they get some out. Please feel free to jump in and grab that.

And if anybody wants to have a chat, one of the things that I love to do since I’m a full-time is talk to people wherever they’re at. And with our platform, having deep dived into 50 different alternative strategies with experts in each of them, panels of people, and we can get your point in the right direction. If we’re not a stop along the way, we’ll find that right.

Jack Hoss:

Well, Patrick, if you’re ready, we’ll jump into the rapid fire and close out this episode.

Patrick Grimes:

Sounds good.

Jack Hoss:

What lie do real estate investors often tell themselves?

Patrick Grimes:

I can do it all myself. I’m the best person to do it.

Jack Hoss:

If you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Patrick Grimes:

Learn to partner.

Jack Hoss:

Do you have a book recommendation or what are you reading right now?

Patrick Grimes:

Being vulnerable here, I’m reading a book called Bulletproof Husband is recommended to me by several of my friends out there that really reframes the relationship of a marriage. And there’s so much divorce going on right now and surrounding me that it’s been fascinating and I think every husband should read this thing. It’s just really cool to spend so much of my life learning in investments, but take a break and take a moment to learn how to be a better husband.

Jack Hoss:

And finally, what single process or tool have you implemented that has had the biggest time-saving impact?

Patrick Grimes:

Using AI for finance and legal, those two. I’d say mostly legal.

Jack Hoss:

Well, I appreciate it, Patrick. One more time, you can learn more by heading over to passiveinvestingmastery.com. Clickable link in the show notes, but really appreciate your time again and I look forward to our next time.

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah. Glad to be here, Jack. Thanks for having me.